



































































Class 1. . .. _ 

Book.-. 

Copyright^ 0 - „i 

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HAROLD MAC GRATH 

















CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S 
KITBAGS 









Captain Wardlaw’s 
Kitbags 


BY 

HAROLD MacGRATH 


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GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. 

1923 



COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE Sc COMPANY 





ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF TRANSLATION 
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 


COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE STORY-PRESS CORPORATION IN THE UNITED 
STATES, GREAT BRITAIN, AND THE COLONIES 


PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES 
AT 

THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 



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CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S 
KITBAGS 






Captain Wardlaw’s Kitbags 

CHAPTER I 

TN THE beginning—it was in the pre-war 
A days—there was a street-fight at night on 
Broadway, before a famous restaurant, a fight 
in which nobody was seriously hurt and over 
the spectacular ending of which there was a 
cackle of laughter. 

Some Yale students had come to town to 
celebrate an athletic victory. They had 
broken up into army groups, as the saying 
goes these days, and the most turbulent group 
had invaded Broadway. They set all that 
territory by the ears and missed jail a dozen 
times because they could run faster than the 
police. They finally gathered before the res¬ 
taurant, doddering as to whether they should 
go on or in, when one of them discovered the 
basic ingredients of a riot. It was a private 
coupe waiting at the curb. The man on 
the box, in shining brass buttons and buff, 
stared ahead erect and detached, his whip at 
rest. 

“Pipe the sea-goer and the captain on the 
< bridge!” 

“Let’s navigate the old hooker up to the 
Park and back!” 



2 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


“You’ve said something!” 

The 'youngsters surged toward the coupe 
and stated their demands. The coachman 
wisely pretended not to hear. One of the 
students ran out and caught the horse by the 
bit. The coachman stood up. 

“Stand off!” he warned. 

“Down from the bridge!” 

The coachman immediately began to lay 
about with his whip—which was an exceed¬ 
ingly unwise thing to do. His action made 
it imperative for the honor of Old Eli to 
drive that coupe to Central Park. 

If there was a policeman near by, he de¬ 
cided that one of the finest was not equal to 
twenty-odd of the wildest. 

The coachman was finally pulled from the 
box. Suddenly the vortex became a series of 
eddies, as if a strong current had burst into 
it from an unexpected source. At the far 
side a silk hat appeared, and it moved de¬ 
terminedly toward the curb and the unhappy 
coachman. The bystanders—typical New 
Yorkers who never meddle with events which 
do not concern them intimately—saw the stu¬ 
dents stagger about like tenpins before they 
understood that a rescue was going toward. 
Presently some of the bystanders caught a 
glimpse of the stranger’s face, and one of 
them recognized the tanned, handsome coun¬ 
tenance with its crisp little military mustache. 
•At least his neighbors heard him mutter a 
single word—“Wardlaw!” 

“Just a moment, boys!” 

“Break away, there!” 




CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


3 


“On your way, Mr. Buttinski! We’re go¬ 
ing to have that hack!” 

“All right. You can drive it to the Park if 
you want to. But do you really want to— 
now?” 

The bystanders automatically pressed closer. 
Here was something really interesting. Sev¬ 
eral of the older men recognized an unusual 
fact in the drawling words. Yonder cool in¬ 
dividual possessed an uncanny insight into 
the psychology of student minds. The boys 
could, having a large majority, take the coupe 
wherever they pleased; but why take it, 
now their power was thus frankly acknowl¬ 
edged? 

“Well, here’s the old hooker. Do you want 
to walk over me to it? Easy as falling off a 
log. You’re twenty to one. But will it be 
worth while? Some of us are due to get 
mussed up. And think of all the lights you 
haven’t seen yet. What’s the good word?” 

“Three cheers for Old Eli, and you win!” 

“Three times three, if you like!” 

“Bully for the plug hat!” 

Some bystander laughed. The laugh was 
caught up and carried around the half-circle. 
Those students closest to the stranger eyed 
him speculatively. Any man who could 
charge through them the way this one had— 
without even losing his hat—was worthy of 
respect. Still, it wasn’t the strong arm; it 
was the fearless attitude, the readiness to com¬ 
bat and the friendly counsel. A student 
laughed, another and another. 

“All right, Mr. Buttinski; consider your- 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


4 

self tapped for Bones. Come on, boys! We 
could have done it!” 

Magically the jam broke into small groups; 
and the north stream and the south stream of 
Broadway resumed its flow. 

The stranger helped the coachman to his 
box. 

“Hurt?” 

“Shaken up a bit, sir. Nothing serious. 
Thank you, sir.” 

“A word of advice. With a mob like that, 
always surrender at once. They didn’t really 
want to drive your coupe; they only wanted 
to prove they could. Good night.” 

Now, this trivial incident set into motion an 
implacable hate and an insatiable curiosity, 
and was in due season to react upon the agri¬ 
cultural future of some four hundred million 
Chinese. All of which forces me to deduce 
that there is no such thing as a trivial incident, 
that one and all are deliberate moves toward 
preconceived ends, whether these ends be love 
or war or business. 


i' }> A A kfh, 'j. M ' 1 


. i-'fci IttS , A. 





CHAPTER II 


N A certain brilliant autumn afternoon, a 
^ rickety station victoria drew up at the 
curb in front of Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo 
and deposited Captain John Wardlaw, late of 
the Engineers, but now the practical head of 
the Hong Kong branch of the Oriental Con¬ 
struction Company of New York. 

Military and political titles have an odd 
way of sticking. Nearly twelve years had 
been filed away since Wardlaw resigned his 
commission; yet from Vladivostok to Manila, 
from Cairo to Yokohama, he was still ad¬ 
dressed as “Captain” by those who knew 
him. 

His luggage consisted of two kitbags— 
small leather trunks, if you wish, that one 
can carry on trains, in the racks, where they 
threaten to fall at every turn and crush the 
passengers below. They were tolerably bat¬ 
tered and belabeled. The Captain took 
charge of one of the bags, despite the porter’s 
protest, and staggered up the terrace steps, 
past the indifferently interested tea-drinkers. 

Some British officers in polo-togs, however, 
stared curiously. For Wardlaw always gave 
the impression of being an officer in mufti. 
The swing of his stride, the straightforward- 

s 


6 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

ness of his approach, the tilt of his chin and 
the resolute gleam in his blue eyes were es¬ 
sentially military. A man cannot success¬ 
fully imitate this military suggestion; nor, 
once having been trained to it, can he discard 
it at will. It becomes an integral part of 
his character; like hammered brass, it cannot 
be wholly smoothed out. 

He glanced neither right nor left but made 
straight for the entrance, the clumsy kitbag 
banging against the calf of his leg. The many 
young women sent mildly speculative glances 
over their teacups. They would have been 
genuinely astonished had they discovered that 
from the curb to the door, Wardlaw’s traverse 
had been one of terror and misery. In the 
cool, dim office he dropped the bag for a 
moment, removed his Panama and wiped his 
forehead. Well, he had run the gamut with¬ 
out stumbling or falling down. He was cer¬ 
tainly getting on in the world. 

“Room and bath, reserved for John Ward- 
law.” 

“We have the room, Mr. Wardlaw.” 

The clerk passed out a key, which Ward- 
law gave to the porter. At once the porter 
started for the stairs. 

“Any mail?” 

“A moment, please.” The clerk went 
through a stack of letters. “Here is a cable 
for you, sir.” 

Wardlaw put the cable unopened into a 
pocket, picked up his bag and walked over to 
the elevator, which he entered. 

A little yellow man, with the humorously 


CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 


7 


tilted eyes which are singularly humorless, 
got up from the lounge and sauntered over to 
the desk. 

“Who was that gentleman who got into 
the lift?” he asked in flawless English. 

“Captain John Wardlaw, Hong Kong. 
You are leaving to-morrow, Mr. Huroki?” 

“Oh, yes.” 

Mr. Huroki then hurried way to the 
billiard room, where he interrupted a game 
between two of his compatriots. The three 
talked in low tones; and the two players ap¬ 
peared to agree with everything Mr. Huroki 
said. At length he walked away, and the two 
resumed their game. 

Outside, another victoria had arrived. 
Steamer- trunks, bandboxes, small bags, and 
kitbags flowed from the curb to the entrance. 
The person to whom these belonged stepped 
down—as Aurora might have stepped down 
from one of her clouds—settled with the 
driver and walked leisurely to the terrace. 

Twenty pairs of masculine eyes widened 
joyfully and hopefully, and forty pairs of 
feminine eyes narrowed, presumably because 
it was instinctive that they should. To any 
one woman the beauty of another is a men¬ 
ace. 

Inasmuch as Captain Wardiaw was pres¬ 
ently to become the shuttlecock in a rather 
amazing game of double battledore, it is not 
out of order to digress for a moment to point 
out certain characteristics of the man, since in 
their application hangs this tale. There are 
some men who cannot help it any more than 



8 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


they can help breathing. It is strongly writ¬ 
ten in the corpuscle. Brave as lions, valiant 
as Palladins, they walk in fear of women. 
Bearded metaphysicians and bulgy-browed 
psychologists mull over the question, look 
wise and say nothing. What can they say? 
Quicksilver is visible, a substance, but you 
can’t pick it up with your fingers, can you? 
It is an unapproachable subject that man born 
of woman should be afraid of women. There 
is nothing logical about it, no handhold for 
analysis; it is the antithesis of nature’s plans. 
The unspeakable misery of a bashful man! 
And we are all of us cruel enough to make 
sport of this affliction. Soldiers, statesmen, 
sailors, explorers, ready to face inconceivable 
dangers and hardships, and equally ready to 
trail their coat-tails on the wind at the sight of 
a pretty woman! 

And so it was with Wardlaw, who went 
hither and thither across the world, grossly 
libeled as a woman-hater, when in truth he 
hated only himself. He was an only child; 
and the god of malice, always at odds with 
the human race, never fails to pounce upon 
the only child; the result is that the only child 
invariably has some peculiar twist in its make¬ 
up. Wardlaw’s was bashfulness. 

In conjunction with this bashfulness—in¬ 
sult to injury, as it were—there was an almost 
childish romanticism. He was as full of ro¬ 
mance as a Chinese water-chestnut is full of 
starch. He had the creative mind of a Dumas 
and was as inarticulate as the Lone Fisher¬ 
man in “Evangeline.” Once, in Simla, he 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


9 


had become acquainted with an American 
astronomer who had just come down from the 
lesser Himalayas with his observations; and 
one afternoon at tiffin Wardlaw laid bare the 

truth. 

“Ah!” mused the scientist. “The petty 
disturbance of collective thought. Subju¬ 
gated easily enough. Will-power.” 

“I’ve got all the will-power in the world; 
but I can’t talk to them.” 

“Force yourself to break the ice, and you 
won’t find the water so cold.” 

“I tried that once, in pure desperation. The 
boat was leaving Colombo. I saw a pretty 
girl at the rail, screwed up my courage, boldly 
approached her and opened up on the 
weather.” Wardlaw grinned as he recollect¬ 
ed the episode. “She greeted me with a how- 
dare-you! And then her brother—nine foot 
high and seven broad—stepped up and asked 
if he should knock my block off. I never 
tried it again.” 

“Mere piffle!” declared the professor. 

“You go to the deuce!” 

“Once never proves anything; it’s twice and 
thrice that lands you somewhere. You’d find 
that out if you’d try hard enough. You don’t 
hate ’em?” 

“Lord love you, no! Why, I’ve got a girl 
picked out in every port, like Billee Taylor, 
but I can’t get any nearer than telescope 
range.” 

“Interesting case, but nevertheless piffling.” 

“I came to you for advice. 

“I’m giving it,” replied the professor 


10 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

blandly. “You’ll never get anywhere by 
wishing. Play the cave-man.” 

“And get my head knocked off by her 
brother? Thanks!” 

“Pick out one that hasn’t any brother,” said 
the professor with a chuckle. 

“I say, that’s worth thinking over,” Ward- 
law admitted soberly. 

He was thirty-seven years old, kitless and 
kinless. At that age a bashful man is rather 
hopeless. In his selected field he was a real 
genius, a master of men, tireless, inventive, 
courageous, a man who undertook Herculean 
jobs and completed them without talk, with¬ 
out fanfare. He was really the kind of hero 
young women dream about, millions and mil¬ 
lions of them, hopefully at seventeen, some¬ 
what doubtfully at twenty, and cynically at 
thirty. 

A bashful man generally has some physical 
defect to begin with. He is hard of hearing; 
he is nearsighted; or he possesses a dull, un¬ 
attractive countenance. He begins by imag¬ 
ining that his defects are glaring, that when 
people smile they are smiling at him. But 
Wardlaw’s defect was purely mental, and was 
quite as inexplicable to himself as to his 
friends; for physically he was a handsome 
man. 

His fear of women had walked beside him 
since boyhood. In all his years he had known 
the companionship of but one woman, his 
mother, who had died shortly after his ap¬ 
pointment to West Point. He did not accept 
this blight pacifically. He fought it dog- 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


11 


gedly, year in and year out, but always hope¬ 
lessly. On the other side of the medal, he was 
not afraid of any man or beast that walked on 
two legs or four, or the biggest job that a man 
could tackle. But a woman! 

Call it odd, but his success was more or less 
due to this bashfulness. The Oriental Con¬ 
struction Company, when it turned over plans 
and specifications to John Wardlaw, knew 
that only death itself could hinder him from 
completing the task. The man who held the 
destinies of the O. C. C. in his hands carried 
a private record of men whom the Far East 
had broken beyond repair because they had 
not been afraid of women. 

After leaving West Point, Wardlaw had 
spent three grilling years in the Philippines. 
He was fond of military life, but he under¬ 
stood that it would take years and politics to 
reach any height worth while, and be wanted 
to get into the middle of things while he was 
young. In other words, his ambition reached 
out beyond what Uncle Sam could do for him. 

One afternoon in Manila he was introduced 
to a guest of the club, a big man, with fine 
eyes and a mellow persuasive voice—Henry 
Ainslee, the head of one of the greatest engin¬ 
eering concerns in the world. The outcome 
of this chance meeting was Wardlaw’s resig¬ 
nation from the Engineers and a start toward 
real fame and fortune. He built bridges, 
breakwaters, canals, oil-wells, reservoirs, and 
railroads. Thus, to date, he had toiled ardu¬ 
ously for fifteen years in the Far East, where 
fibres loosen quickly and morals become ex- 


12 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


pediencies; yet his flesh had not softened, nor 
his morals. Only three times had he returned 
to his native land in these fifteen years. 

The head office in New York was rather a 
nebulous concern to him. Of the three men 
in control, he knew only Ainslee intimately. 
Clarke, the general manager, and his nephew 
Carrington, the supply man, he knew scarcely 
at all, a condition of affairs due to the immense 
distance between Hong Kong and New York, 
whether you faced east or west. If he knew 
Ainslee well, it was because Ainslee was an 
inveterate traveler and took keen pleasure in 
visiting the scenes of various enterprises under 
construction. Owning a fast sea-going yacht, 
it was nothing for Ainslee to coal up and set 
out upon a thirteen-thousand-mile voyage. 
Regularly, once a year, he turned up in Hong 
Kong. 

Thus, Wardlaw’s affections had instantly 
gone out to Ainslee. The millionaire drew 
him irresistibly. He sensed the big soul be¬ 
hind the amiability, the genuineness of the 
ideals that had made the O. C. C. an example 
for others to follow. 

Ainslee had a way—rather embarrassing to 
delinquents—of popping in upon one unan¬ 
nounced. There was one occasion Wardlaw 
would always remember. He had been put¬ 
ting up oil-pumps in Burma, and who should 
step off the Irrawaddy packet but the old boy 
himself. For two weeks Ainslee hovered at 
Wardlaw’s elbow, and it was only on the night 
of his departure by train to Rangoon that the 
young engineer recalled the amazing fact that 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


13 


during all this time Ainslee had never offered 
advice. 

“Son,” said Ainslee suddenly, just as the 
train was about to move, “you’ve delivered 
the goods. When a man doesn’t ask me for 
advice and I don’t offer it, he doesn’t need it. 
When this job is done, you will proceed to 
Hong Kong and take charge of that office. 
Shake ’em up. Find men who are congenial 
to you. Your salary will be ten thousand a 
year. And on the day you ask me for a raise 
I’ll fire you. Good luck and good-by!” 

Nothing more than that. Wardlaw remem¬ 
bered going back to his camp in a kind of 
amethystine haze. From a hundred to two 
hundred, with a mere wave of the hand like 
that! But from that day forth Wardlaw went 
about his world establishing engineering prec¬ 
edents. He finished jobs before time-limits, 
and he never had to go back to patch up 
hurried work. He took Ainslee’s warning 
seriously, but each Christmas he would find 
a few shares on his desk. It was sheer happi¬ 
ness to work for a man like that. 

He knew Clarke, the general manager, to 
be a hard driver. After several years of read¬ 
ing a man’s correspondence, it is possible to 
reconstruct him mentally and physically. A 
gray bullet for a head, a thin mouth, an eagle’s 
beak for a nose, a dynamo made up of human 
coils—that was Clarke as Wardlaw had drawn 
him visually; and his astonishment was pro¬ 
found when he saw that the real Clarke filled 
out the imaginative lines neatly. But he did 
not like Clarke; he only admired him. 


14 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


It was the same with Craig Carrington, the 
nephew. Wardlaw admired him, but did not 
like him. There was too much calculation, 
too little spontaneity in his letters. But as a 
supply man he had no peer in America, young 
as he was. In constructing him by mail, how¬ 
ever, Wardlaw had missed the target com¬ 
pletely. Upon his first return to New York 
he had found an exceedingly handsome young 
man, suave and blase, who preferred New 
York to adventure, money to ideals. 

There was a certain guilelessness about 
Wardlaw. Because he was the soul of honor, 
he believed everybody else to be. As yet, he 
had never really fallen afoul a business intri¬ 
gue, and so his illustions were still untar¬ 
nished. That for six years, now, Carrington 
had been adroitly placing obstacles in his path, 
delaying materials, was undreamed of by 
Wardlaw. Like all shy, diffident men, he was 
incurious. The little ripples of office poli¬ 
tics never touched him, or if they did, passed 
unnoticed. He went his way serenely, over¬ 
coming obstacles as they fell, taking it for 
granted that certain delays and obstructions 
were acts of God instead of man. 

So much for the man—the shuttlecock of 
this tale. The woman, having arrived, let us 
spin the whirligig. Women! What should 
we do without them? And what is more to 
the point these days, what shall we men do 

ejniih them? 



CHAPTER III 


TF I have called the man the shuttlecock, I 
A might with equal liberty call the woman 
the feather in the wind. Immediately upon 
entering her room, she undressed and took a 
bath. She even washed her head; and if you 
are a woman, you’ll appreciate the risk she 
took; there being but two scant hours before 
dinner. She came forth rosy and resolute, 
dressed in a wonderful peacock kimono. From 
a small satchel she took out a contrivance 
resembling a comb which could be electri¬ 
cally heated. Thus, by six o’clock, her hair 
was perfectly dry. Women build up their 
hair and then get into their gowns, which is 
a procedure no man will ever fully compre¬ 
hend. 

Next she brought out four gowns and laid 
them on the bed. Then she walked up and 
down past them like a general reviewing his 
troops—which is not a bad simile, if you’ll 
think it over. Bird of paradise, yellow- 
warbler, thrush and blackbird; she finally de¬ 
cided upon the blackbird, because, perhaps, 
her mood at this moment was inclined toward 
sombre things. 

The decision made, she produced a small 
book, sat down before the little writing-table 
and began slowly to write, referring to the 

15 



16 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

book at the completion of each word. Ten 
minutes later she summoned "a maid, giving 
her three sovereigns and the message she had 
written so laboriously. d 

“Send this cable at once and bring me the 
receipt. Such change as remains you may 
keep.” 

“Yes, madame.” 

Under the first light she came to, the maid 
attempted to read the message. But she did 
not succeed. It was a jumble of English 
words, each understandable in itself but col¬ 
lectively as illuminating as the hieroglyphics 
on the queen’s tomb at Karnac. 

Speaking of affinity of ideas: Wardlaw also 
took to the tub. He washed his hair, too, 
and dried it in two minutes. The ride up 
from Alexandria, always dusty, had been un¬ 
usually so to-day. Gusty east winds had 
rioted all day across the desert bluffs. There 
was fine sand in his hair, in his ears and his 
mustache. After the bath he wrapped him¬ 
self in a Chinese gown of silk brocade—the 
color of which signified that, good Chinaman 
that he was, he was worshipping the recent 
demise of his grandfather—and opened his 
cable. It was in code and from Ainslee, 
dated at Hong Kong. Eagerly he got out his 
code-book, drew a chair up to the table and 
commenced to decode the message, confident 
that all the fog of the past few weeks would be 
promptly dissipated. 

Engineers of Wardlaw’s calibre are more 
or less secret agents of big business. The 
golden text is: “Keep your own secret. 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


17 


out what the other fellow is going to do, and 
beat him to it.” In these colossal engineer¬ 
ing enterprises international politics was al¬ 
ways intermeddling and contravening; Amer¬ 
ica, England, Germany, and Japan fought 
each other continually in the Far East, and 
none of them was particularly scrupulous as 
to methods when many millions were in¬ 
volved. Wardlaw had escaped actual contact 
with this phase because Ainslee always 
handled that side of the business, being the 
prince of diplomats and negotiators. 

It took Wardlaw a quarter of an hour to 
decode the message; but the final sentence, 
complete in itself, refused to disintegrate. 
Wardlaw scrubbed his chin impatiently. But 
for the keen phrasing of the main message, 
the hidden message would have looked like a 
joke, rather a silly one, too. “How old was 
Cupid?” Was that straight English, and if 
so, what was Ainslee trying to say? He was 
about to give up the riddle, when he recalled 
the addendum to the office code, really a per¬ 
sonal code between himself and Ainslee, 
rarely used by either. The banal inquiry be¬ 
came a sinister warning. “Beware the little 
yellow men.” This warning, in conjunction 
with what he had already translated, was il¬ 
luminating. 

He applied a match to both cable and trans¬ 
lation, crumpled the black ash into powder 
and blew it from the ash-try. Then, with his 
hands behind his back, he paced his room. 
He was not a man given to flares; he was ex¬ 
ceedingly economical in his gestures; but 


18 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


never had such rage burned in his heart as at 
this moment. 

The infernal black crookedness of it! The 
name wiped off the records, the fleet’s blue flag 
with its white diagonal stripe cleared off the 
seas, the O. C. C. a memory! To throw an 
honorable and profitable business on the rocks 
because a few men had ideas instead of an 
Idea! To freeze out Henry Ainslee and re¬ 
legate him to the shelf, to merge the O. C. C. 
with the General Construction, which was 
controlled by a clique of callous stock-jobbers: 
so that was it! This was the fog he had been 
stumbling through blindly! And why had 
the old boy kept him in the dark until this 
moment? 

He filled and lighted his pipe, and a trail 
of blue smoke eddied and swirled after him. 
Ainslee ill, and Clarke, Carrington and their 
followers snarling at his heels—the lowest 
kind of treachery! And the future of the 
O. C. C. depended solely upon John Ward- 
law’s ability to get to Hong Kong on a cer¬ 
tain date. That was enough. John Ward- 
law would get to Hong Kong. 

“If this deal falls, we fall with it. I hate 
to lug you into a game like this. But I need 
you. It isn’t the money; they never can get 
to me deeply enough there to hurt me. It’s 
the Idea that grew out of that old theodolite 
back in my study. Old Dick Cameron and I 
carried that across the Chilean Andes thirty- 
three years ago. Old Dick is dead, and now 
they mark me for the shelf. I’ve been ill, 
son; and I have had to use my illness as a 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


19 


cloak. I let Clarke have the idea that I was 
breaking down mentally. But the old dog 
has one bite left, as he shall find. The truth 
is, they are mighty near their goal. I’ve con¬ 
trolled the O. C. C. because, since Cameron 
died, I’ve had the power to vote the estate’s 
holdings. They have secretly hammered the 
Middale Steel—Cameron’s old pet—until the 
Cameron holdings in the O. C. C. have been 
bitten into dangerously. They need but a few 
hundred shares to swing the merger next 
March—only seven months away. And if we 
fail in China, even those loyal to me will go 
over to the enemy. 

“When they recalled you to New York— 
you will recollect my cable to keep mum— 
you must have let something out of the bag. 
Perhaps I should have made my warning 
more explicit, but I was ill. I wanted to get 
to sea, where I could act unwatched. They 
pumped something out of you, anyhow. You 
are not used to business intrigue, and those 
two are. I’ve had a detective on their heels 
for weeks. Clarke’s own stenographer is on 
my side, and it was through her I learned that 
Carrington had anonymously tipped the Jap¬ 
anese consulate at Naples; and the Japs have 
no love for you since you beat them outon the 
Hu-peh canals. They have marked China 
down for their own, and our one hope lies in 
the sullen bitterness of the Chinese Govern¬ 
ment. It’s up to you to keep the old plate 
going. This scheme was originally yours, 
so I’ve no one to bank on but you. Get to me.” 

The old plate! Wardlaw would never for- 





y- ? T 

20 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

get the single dinner he had had at Ainslee’s, 
nine years ago. They had gone into the study 
for coffee and cigars, and the old boy had 
pointed to the wall above the bookshelves. 
“See that, son?” 

It was a bit of bronze a foot long and three • 
inches wide. In embossed letters ran these 
words: The Oriental Construction Com¬ 
pany of New York. 

“Young man, that’s more than a piece of 
bronze; it’s an Idea. In Africa, in South 
America, in India, in Siam, in China, in the 
South Seas, you’ll find that plate embedded in 
cement. Behind it, in invisible letters, you’ll 
see the word Service. I have seen cities grow 
up beside that plate; great ships have found 
safety and haven behind it. It has made his¬ 
tory; it has opened up wildernesses to human¬ 
ity. With me the money is nothing; the Idea 
is everything. Always keep that plate in 
your mind’s eye.” 

Wardlaw went over the past month, his ar¬ 
rival in New York, his interview with Clarke 
and Carrington. He hadn’t been with them 
ten minutes before he had stepped into their 
clever trap—indirectly, the old boy’s fault. 
Had this cable arrived that day in Hong 
Kong, he would never have returned to New 
York, despite Clarke’s peremptory orders; he 
would have had at his elbow a thousand legit¬ 
imate excuses to remain where he was. Well, 
the damage was done. “Watch your kitbags. 
Beware the little yellow men.” So be it! 

He repacked the kitbag from which he had 
taken the code-book, but left out his service- 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


21 


able revolver, which he laid on the stand be¬ 
tween the two windows, covering it with a 
newspaper. Then he tiptoed to the door, 
opening it suddenly. The corridor was empty. 
Next he approached the door which led into 
the adjoining room. This was locked. He 
listened intently. Evidently the next room 
was unoccupied; otherwise he would have 
heard the occupants stirring about at this hour. 

The kitbag he himself had carried up he 
placed by the side of the bed. He took one 
of the pillows off and hid it behind the bath¬ 
tub. Under the first sheet he laid the kitbag 
sidewise, covering it with the second sheet and 
drawing up the counter-pane in such a fash¬ 
ion as to deceive any eye but that of an expe¬ 
rienced chambermaid. 

This work completed to his satisfaction, he 
began to dress for dinner. The old military 
habit still clung to him. When in civilized 
parts of the world, he was somewhat of a 
dandy in regard to his clothes. At length he 
picked up his pipe and pouch, set his Panama 
jauntily and started for the door. Once there, 
he turned and sent a glance about the room. 
He turned, set the remaining kitbag on the 
centre-table, dusted the lock with talc and 
went out, leaving the lights on; a light seen 
through a transom, always suggests that the 
room beyond is occupied. He left word at 
the office not to permit the maid to enter the 
room to turn the sheets. At half after seven 
he entered the dining room. 

It was late October. The season in Cairo 
was just beginning. The dining room was 


22 


<v 

CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 

filled with beautiful women from all over the 
world. The dazzling shoulders and arms, 
the flash and sparkle of gems, the wonderful 
heads of hair, each with its individualistic 
touch, ranging from blue-black to spun amber 
—it was an entrancing picture to Wardlaw. 

He followed the head waiter in and out 
among the tables, hearing a snatch of con¬ 
versation here, a tinkle of laughter there, 
scenting violet and rose and orris-root, and 
sometimes accidentally touching a gleaming 
shoulder. He was given a single table by the 
wall, a situation which pleased him. From 
this point of vantage he could feast his eyes to 
his heart’s content. 

Women, he mused. What was the matter 
with him? What had been the matter with 
him all these lonely years? From whom had 
he inherited his infernal diffidence? The 
misery of those early days in Manila, when 
they dragged him out to dinners and dances, 
his brother officers, and left him high and dry 
with his back to the wall! Homely men, 
brutes, namby-pambies, pretty fellows, one 
and all of them possessed the courage to en¬ 
gage a woman in ordinary conversation, while 
he, John Wardlaw, could only sputter like 
cannel coal. Why? And yet, if this affinity- 
talk amounted to anything, there was a girl 
for him somewhere. But would he know her 
when he saw her? Would he wait for her to 
catch up, or would he take to his heels as he 
always did? 

Little yellow men. It was sobering. He 
knew the Japanese more than ordinarily well. 




CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 


2 3 


Once they embarked against this project, they 
would stop at nothing. They had been every¬ 
where in China. What a time he and his 
boys had had in getting out of Peking un¬ 
noticed, unfollowed! And yet they had been 
followed. That street-riot in Fen-chow hadn’t 
been accidental. O’Holleran’s theodolite had 
been smashed by someone who knew what it 
was. And then there was that Jap he had 
found in his room at Ah Fuch’s teahouse in 
Kung-chang-Fu. All this, no doubt, on a 
basis that John Wardlaw was well worth 
watching! But he had fooled them. He had 
done the surveying from the Tsaidam Swamps 
toward the coast. From the real beginning 
until they finally landed in Shanghai, not a 
suspicious interruption of any kind. They 
had suffered a lot of physical discomforts, to 
be sure, and had had a narrow escape from 
typhoid, which the white man will ever find 
at his elbow in China; and they had had 
months of hunger. But they had done the job. 

Because of the aggressive and suspicious at¬ 
titude of the Japanese, they had been forced 
to go at this adventure from a new angle. 
Ordinarily you went to the Chinese Govern¬ 
ment—always kindly toward Americans—and 
got your concession, all your powers of author¬ 
ity, rights of way, and so forth; then you shoul¬ 
dered your theodolite. Thus they had put 
the cart before the horse, covertly. A secret 
expedition over two thousand miles of a China 
few white men knew anything about, on foot, 
in pole-chairs and bullock-carts, crawling 
along at a hundred odd miles the month, 




24 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

across mountains, down valleys, over rivers, 
skirting deserts and marshes, sleeping in dog- 
tents, half frozen at night and always hungry 
—a colossal venture which must have stirred 
the shade of Hercules. And a whispered 
word would have knocked the whole thing 
higher than Wu’s dragon kite. And he, 
O’Holleran, Chedsoye, and Jones—they had 
done the job! 

A business intrigue! After an immortal 
adventure, sordidness! Treachery from the 
inside. Beyond supercaution, Wardlaw knew 
he possessed no talent for this quality of ad¬ 
venture. He built things; he didn’t tear 
them down. For twenty-odd days he would 
be at sea, guarding against the unknown. The 
Japs were patient beyond a white man’s un¬ 
derstanding; they were not only inscrutable, 
but proud and fearless and merciless—and 
vain. They h,ad marked China for them¬ 
selves, and woe to the meddler! 

Carrington! Wardlaw’s jaws knotted com¬ 
batively. So his dislike for Carrington had 
been based upon something worthily instinc¬ 
tive. And, irony of fate, he had, in a burst of 
pardonable enthusiasm, shown the ace in his 
sleeve to that cold, handsome, calculating in¬ 
triguer. He had said: “Five years!” And 
Carrington, first-rate engineer that he was, 
despite his cold-bloodedness, had instantly 
grasped the truth of the stupendous task prac¬ 
tically completed by four tireless, resolute, 
loyal men. And that he was going to use this 
knowledge for his own private ends was made 
clear in Ainslee’s warning. 


25 


CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 

He was sorry and depressed, but he did not 
blame himself wholly. Ainslee should have 
been more explicit in his first cable; and even 
this lack of foresight was excusable, since the 
old boy was ill. Clarke had told him that, 
and had even dared to add that Ainslee’s mind 
was giving away. It was one of those singular 
twists of fate which no man may successfully 
avoid. 

Why had they permitted him to come thus 
far unmolested? Half the journey done, and 
not an enemy in sight. Perhaps it was the old 
story; east of Suez strange things happened 
that were never solved. Victory lay in the 
bottom of that kitbag, and he would carry it 
into the Hong Kong office, on a certain date, 
in face of a hundred Mikados. 

He ate his dinner leisurely. When the 
sirupy coffee was set before him, he lighted a 
cigar. Some day, after he retired from active 
service—and men of Wardlaw’s stamp are al¬ 
ways retiring and dying in harness—he would 
spend a winter in Cairo. 

From now on his ruminations were frag¬ 
mentary. Just as he was following some train 
of thought, a beautiful woman left the room, 
and he had perforce to watch her navigate 
through the linen-covered islands. 

Absently he reached into the inner pocket 
of his coat for a bit of paper to draw on— 
the arch of some culvert, maybe, or that half¬ 
moon which would take in one of the richest 
jade-quarries in China—and discovered an 
old letter from New York. As he unfolded 
it to turn it face downward, a name caught 



I 


26 CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 

his eye. Always this name stirred his curios¬ 
ity, though never to a point of actual investi¬ 
gation. Richard Cameron had been dead 
eleven years, and still his name and official 
standing headed all official paper. No doubt 
Ainslee’s influence and domination accounted 
for this bit of sentimentality, for Wardlaw 
could assign it to nothing else. Odd, but he 
had never seen Cameron, who had died in 
Mexico. 

Cameron the force and Ainslee the diplo¬ 
mat, the negotiator; Cameron the thunderbolt 
and Ainslee the interviewer of emperors and 
kings and potentates; and perhaps the threat¬ 
ening disaster was due to the fact that the old 
boy had broken his health in a vain endeavor 
to play both games after the death of his part¬ 
ner. And quietly Clarke, who was force, a 
dynamo turned by avarice instead of ideals, 
had slipped into Cameron’s shoes. 

Suddenly Wardlaw sat up stiffly in his chair, 
forgot the past, the future and the unknown 
dangers which threatened it. There was, at 
this precise moment, no room in his thoughts 
for anything but the amazing present. 

She! 


CHAPTER IV 


VTALIANTLY he had tried to smother the 
* thought of her, and Ainslee’s revelations 
had succeeded to a certain extent in the ac¬ 
complishment of this desire. And yonder she 
came, winding in and out among the tables, 
alone, toward him! His heart began to beat 
thunderously, and his ears filled with the 
sound of it. Evidently the vacant table at 
the right was her objective. 

She was dressed in black, a dull black, 
which gave to her beautiful face, arms and 
shoulders the brilliant luminous whiteness of 
summer clouds. Her hair, thick black coils, 
seemed to throw off faint prismatic colors as 
she passed under lights. 

Wardlaw drew in a long breath, slowly. 
He had discovered that by so doing he could 
control his heart-beats, more or less, after the 
first idiotic jump. 

She sat down calmly and surveyed the other 
diners. 

In reaching for a match that he did not 
need, Wardlaw knocked over his glass of 
water. A waiter had to rush frantically for¬ 
ward, of course, whip off the drenched cloth, ! 
supply a fresh one and attract the attention of 
everybody. Wardlaw did not have the cour- 

2 7 


28 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


age to act upon his immediate desire, to rise 
and leave forthwith. These awkward blun¬ 
ders always, had the faculty of temporarily 
paralyzing him. Yet not even the waiter, a 
passable judge of human beings, suspected that 
he was gazing upon a mild order of mental 
debacle/ Beyond a sudden acceleration of 
color, fairly well hidden under his tan, Ward- 
law’s face was bland enough. 

Within three feet of him the woman who 
had been filling his thoughts unduly for days! 
First at the theatre in New York, then on the 
Cretic the day before they landed at Naples, 
again on the jetty in Constantinople—now at 
his very elbow! Who was she? What was 
she? Whither bound? Because of his 
weakness, was he ever to know? 

His shoulders drooped slightly. Here was 
the sort—outwardly, anyhow—of woman he 
had always dreamed about, woven his inartic¬ 
ulate romances around. There were no doubt 
men who knew her intimately. Lucky dogs! 
Or there might be one man who had his seat 
at the table of the gods. She! 

Setting his jaws, he turned and looked at 
her boldly, even truculently—to find to his 
horror that she was looking squarely at him! 
But even before he could avert his gaze, he 
saw that in this look of hers there was appar¬ 
ently neither interest nor curiosity. She might 
have looked at a table-leg like that. Infernal, 
idiotic heart! He dropped his napkin and 
rose. 

Blissfully unconscious that more than one 
roving feminine glance followed him. Ward- 





CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


29 


law strode off toward the exit. The lady in 
black stared at his flat shoulders. This time 
there was interest in her eyes, which were as 
gray as the sea on misty summer mornings, 
deep as wells, and like wells, reflective. You 
saw the sky there, the sailing clouds, the stars, 
but you saw not what lay below. She smiled. 
Da Vinci, who knew more about women’s 
smiles than all the other painters put together, 
would have seized upon it illuminatingly; but 
his brush would have discovered a touch of 
pity in her eyes despite the faintly ironic twist 
to her lips. 

“The great Wardlaw,” she murmured. 
“Well, we shall see.” 

Wardlaw went on into the lounging room, 
confused by a riot of conflicting emotions. 
He was happy, miserable, elated, depressed, 
puzzled. She! He lighted another cigar, 
but it went out half a dozen times, a fact 
which would have marked perturbation in 
any user of the weed. 

The unknown, who had practically if un¬ 
wittingly driven him out of the dining room, 
took her time. She seemed more interested in 
her paper-covered Tauchnitz than in the an¬ 
imated scene which draws so many to Shep- 
heard’s to dine. From time to time, however, 
her gray eyes roved over the top of her novel. 
Her fingers were ringless. She wore a 
single jewel, a polished emerald shoulder- 
buckle. 

Never doubt it, the other women, many of 
them having noted her arrival at tea-time, 
were watching her, speculating upon her age 


3 o CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

and her past. The men saw nothing but her 
extraordinary beauty. A beautiful young 
woman, however, dining alone in public, is 
sure to invite malice and suspicion. In Cairo 
she will be either of two things, a princess 
junketing incognita or an adventuress. Nat¬ 
urally the women wrote her down adventuress 
and warned their men folks. Cairo was too 
near that notorious Port Said. 

In parenthesis: poor old Port Said, grossly 
maligned for thirty years—dead and dull as 
the Bitter Lakes west of it, boasting these 
days of a few dilapidated bars, hotels run 
down at the heel, and a barnlike moving 
picture theatre! But east of it—well, you 
shall see. 

Late, Wardlaw saw the unknown enter and 
take the chair directly in front of the leader 
of the string orchestra. Believing himself 
unobserved, he watched her closely. 

Immediately—for such is the irrepressible 
Latin—the orchestra leader began to play to 
her. He twisted, rolled his eyes, swayed his 
slender body, until Wardlaw wanted to rush 
over, seize the fiddle and break it over the 
fool’s head. But even as this desire came to 
him, he saw the unknown—yawn! This dis¬ 
concerted the violinist, who at once selected 
some one a trifle more receptive. Wardlaw 
chuckled. Evidently she was able to take 
care of herself. 

A woman who could take care of herself! 
He had never cared for the clinging kind, not 
even in his high-flown romances. In his im¬ 
agination he fell in love with a woman who 




CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


3i 


invariably rode, hunted, fished, dauntless 
under all conditions. Yonder beauty—pshaw, 
to-morrow she would pass out of his life 
forever. It was a habit they had, these charm¬ 
ing creatures: they always departed just about 
the time he made up his mind to learn some¬ 
thing about them. 

Dark eyelashes are of inestimable value to 
the possessor. One can, as it were, see with¬ 
out being seen. A slight droop of the eyelid, 
and the eye becomes hidden, but little remains 
hidden from that eye. Having ceased to be 
amused at the antics of the violinst, the un¬ 
known lowered her lashes and peered through 
them. Her glance stopped when it reached 
Wardlaw’s keen, intelligent face, with its 
salient jaws, its crisp brown military mustache 
turned up slightly at the ends. Something 
pleased her, for a smile, shadowy, like a cloud 
passing over a field of wheat, stirred her lips 
and was gone before Mr. Huroki was sure that 
it had existed at all. In passing, however, he 
noticed that the smile left behind an imprint 
of gravity and seriousness. 

His second cigar finished, Wardlaw sighed 
and got up. He would have liked to watch 
her all the evening, but he recognized the 
folly of such a proceeding. He went outside 
into the moonshine. The world lay magic¬ 
ally white under his gaze. He walked with¬ 
out any particular destination in view, and at 
length found himself leaning against the steel 
parapet of the great Nile bridge. The flow¬ 
ing river, varnished with blazing silver, shot 
underneath with a thousand pleasant little 


32 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

sounds. At his left, moored along the em¬ 
bankment, were the reedlike masts of the fel¬ 
uccas, forming a swaying lattice across the 
brilliant disc of the moon. Egypt! 

To know a woman like that, to have her at 
one’s side down through the highway of the 
years! He laughed humanly. Had he ever 
seen a beautiful woman without wishing this 
very thing? On the other hand, it was logical 
that he should think strongly about this young 
woman who had crossed his path so peculiarly. 
He took out his pipe, but he did not fill it. 
He thrust it back into his pocket, jammed his 
hat securely on his head—and began to run. 
He vaulted sleeping beggars, circled snarling 
dogs, dodged pedestrians, broke through a 
camel-train, dashed up the Shepheard terrace 
and never lessened his gait until he was inside 
his room. He was a fine specimen of a man 
to handle big affairs! But nothing in his 
room had been disturbed. 

It was half after eleven; he undressed and 
got into his pajamas, turned out the lights and 
sat down by one of the windows. He wasn’t 
sleepy. He sat there, planning his future and 
building old dreams over again. He must 
have idled away more than an hour in this 
manner, silent and motionless, when suddenly 
he lowered his pipe and assumed a listening 
attitude. He had a pair of remarkably keen 
ears. What he heard was the rasp of a door¬ 
knob turning. Naturally he focused his gaze 
upon the door which opened out into the cor¬ 
ridor or hall. And yet obliquely he saw a 
black space slowly widen in the wall at his 





CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


33 


right—the door which gave into the adjoining 
room. He reached for his revolver. 

“I wouldn’t come any further,” he said 
quietly. 

But the black space went on widening. 


CHAPTER V 


TN THE very still period which followed 

his challenge, Wardlaw thought keenly 
and bitterly. Before sailing from Hong 
Kong, some invisible presence had warned 
him, but he had stubbornly declined to listen. 
Why? Never before had he ignored that 
secret impulse which had been his guidance 
so many times in the past. Why hadn’t he let 
O’Holleran accompany him—that fighting 
blue-eyed red-head, who could think quicker 
in danger than any one he knew? 

By and by the black space ceased to grow, 
and Wardlaw concluded that the door to the 
adjoining bedroom was wide open. He leaned 
forward, tense and expectant, his revolver 
ready. Having sat in the dark for more than 
an hour, he could distinguish one object from 
another more or less accurately. Strain his 
eyes as he might—using the oblique glance 
which is often better than the direct in the 
dark—he could see nothing beyond that black 
space. No gray patch appeared to suggest a 
human face. The door had simply opened to 
its full width—nothing more than that. 

He was used to nerve racking moments, but 
not of this peculiar quality. He had often 
reckoned with ambushes in the old Mindanao 
days, but always he had known the character 

34 




CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


35 


of the danger. But to sit still and wait for 
something you knew nothing about, a danger 
which announced its presence in this ghostly 
manner! 

Having strained his eyes without success, 
he switched to his ears, for it is a physiological 
fact that one cannot strain both at the same 
time. The room had that supreme breathless 
silence of a pyramid-top. Yet he was abso¬ 
lutely certain that some one else was in the 
room. Fox a decade or more he had lived in 
the open; and to all who are fond of Nature, 
she lends a sixth sense. Wardlaw could not 
have explained; he only knew that some one 
else was in the room. One man or two? 

He happened to recollect that he was in 
half-silhouette against the window, a square 
of pale reflected moonshine. But before he 
could leverage himself to his feet, a pair of 
sinewy arms seized his elbows, and he was 
jerked violently back. Something wet and 
sickly smelling was clapped over his nose. 

When Wardlaw’s senses returned—as a 
swimmer comes up from a deep dive, dazed 
and breathless—he was sitting in his chair. 
The room was dark. But for the evil taste 
on his tongue and the enervation, it might have 
been an unpleasant dream. He flung off the 
lassitude, the craving to sit still and do noth¬ 
ing, and staggered to his feet. There was no 
black space in the wall now; the door had 
been closed. He crossed the room to the light- 
switch and turned the key. He blinked for 
a moment, then looked at the bed. Untouched. 
All his confidence in himself returned. They 



36 CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 

had overlooked that kitbag; but the one he 
had placed on the centre-table was gone. 

He went into the bathroom, filled the bowl 
and soused his head and face, vigorously 
towelling himself. He then put on his trous¬ 
ers and coat over his pajamas and went down¬ 
stairs. It was after two oclock, and it took 
ten minutes to rout out some one in authority. 

“Who occupies the room next to mine?” he 
demanded. 

“What is your number?” 

Wardlaw gave it. “I’ve heard strange 
sounds there.” 

“That is hardly possible, sir. The room 
is empty, being held in reservation for the 
Princess Zenia.” 

“Empty?” 

“Yes, sir. Perhaps you were dreaming a 
little.” 

•r' 

Wardlaw thought for a moment. “That 
would be a good joke on me. I wonder, now!” 

“Too much Turkish coffee, if you are not 
used to it, will do that, sir.” 

“Never thought of that. Sorry to trouble 
you.” 

Wardlaw returned to his room. On the 
centre-table stood the missing bag. He ran 
to it. Locked! He took out his keys and un¬ 
locked it. The contents had been man¬ 
handled, but everything was there, even the 
code-book. 

“The infernal beggars!” he murmured. 
“Keys for the next room and keys for my bags! 
And how’d they guess I’d go downstairs?” 

These questions were followed by a thought 



CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 


37 


which wrinkled his forehead. He began to 
understand. He was not dealing with ordi¬ 
nary intelligence. All this had been carefully 
planned. There was behind this adventure a 
brain which could anticipate his actions. If 
only he had had the sense to bring O’Holleran 
along! 

Wardlaw went over to the window and sat 
down again. There was a real struggle in 
front, then? They hadn’t been afraid to 
chloroform him. Rather ominous signifi¬ 
cance. To gain their ends, then, they would 
stop at nothing. It was something to his ad¬ 
vantage that he could arrive thus quickly at 
this conclusion. He must always remain on 
board at night; no prowling about Aden, 
Colombo, Penang, or Singapore; he must give 
them no opportunity to disable him physi¬ 
cally. The next best thing for his mysterious 
assailants, supposing eventually they did not 
get to that kitbag in the bed, would be his 
temporary or permanent elimination from the 
game. 

“How old was Cupid?” “Beware the little 
yellow men ” From now on he would leave 
nothing to chance. He would base all his 
future actions upon his intimate knowledge of 
brown and yellow people|. He would not 
play into their hands, as many a white man 
had, by considering his cunning superior to 
theirs. He sensibly knew that it was not. 
Only Japs could have crawled across his room 
without his hearing them. There was still a 
bit of puzzle. Why hadn’t they entered the 
room during his absence? Perhaps it was 


38 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

due to an inherent trait: having once planned 
a certain method of attack, your Japanese 
never turns until he has tried it. 

Having taken this orientation of a novel 
situation, Wardlaw went to bed, confident 
that he would not be disturbed again that 
night. Nor was he. 

The next morning he was none the worse 
for the midnight adventure. Physically he 
was normal; mentally he had never felt so 
keen in all his life. To get to Hong Kong 
in spite of all! 

Deep down in his heart he knew that he 
was acting wrongly in one respect, but his 
stubbornness would not permit him to change 
his course. And some one, being aware of 
this characteristic, built accordingly. 

“How old was Cupid?” The phrase kept 
running through his head. How the old boy 
must have chuckled over it! How he loved 
a good joke, a good story! Nobody like him. 
What a father he would have made for some 
man—John. Wardlaw, for instance, who had 
really never known a father. Henry Ainslee! 
All right, if he failed the old boy, it would be 
because his ticket was going to take him a good 
deal farther than Hong Kong. All he wanted 
was a foot on the deck of the P. and O. liner. 

At nine-thirty Wardlaw stepped into the 
train, found a seat in a smoking compartment, 
hoisted his kitbags to the rack and lighted his 
pipe. 

Just as the train began to move, a Japanese 
came in and took the seat opposite Wardlaw. 
It happened to be the only one vacant. He 







39 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

bobbed and smiled at everyone. There was 
an exaggerated quirk to his eyes that made 
one suspect that the owner saw the world only 
as a huge joke, never laughing out loud at it, 
but always on the verge. A little investiga¬ 
tion, however, might have disclosed the fact 
that they were singularly humorless eyes. 

Shortly after the three Englishmen who 
were the other occupants of the compartment 
—officers returning to their posts in India— 
and Wardlaw opened their newspapers. When 
he reached the fashion-news, Wardlaw low¬ 
ered his sheet. The jap was vainly endeavor¬ 
ing to roll a cigarette the American way, and 
his knees were peppered with golden flake. 

Wardlaw smiled amiably. “Let me show 
you how to do that.” 

The Jap smiled gratefully and passed the 
paper and tobacco. Wardlaw laid a paper 
on his left palm, sprinkled some tobacco on it 
and with a few manipulations—so rapid that 
they were almost sleight-of-hand—rolled a 
perfect cigarette, which he extended. 

“By Jove!” cried one of the Englishmen, 
who had been an interested spectator. “That’s 
clever of you. With one hand! And I’ve 
tried the bally trick with two hands a thou¬ 
sand times and can’t make it.” 

“Trick is the word,” replied Wardlaw. “An 
old cowboy trooper of mine taught me how 
to do it.” 

“The American Army?” 

“Resigned.” 

“Saw some of your chaps in China—lanky 
youngsters. Rather fooled you, you know; 




4 o CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

didn’t seem up to the mark until they got into 
the shindy. Not much on discipline, I take 
it.” 

“That depends. We try to educate our 
men into thinking fighters. We want every 
man an officer embryo.” 

“It can’t be done,” declared the English¬ 
man. 

“See!” interrupted the Jap triumphantly. 

“Very well done,” said Wardlaw. 

Once more the newspapers crackled, but 
Wardlaw only pretended to read. All cut- 
and-tried, he thought. Had this fellow been 
in his room, or was he the director? Ward- 
law knew that no one carried that American 
brand of tobacco without knowing how to roll 
an ordinary cigarette. The little j^ellow man 
knew all about it; his awkwardness had been 
assumed to attract attention. During the 
conversation with the English officer, Ward- 
law had not neglected to watch the Jap ob¬ 
liquely. The clumsy efforts had continued 
for a space; then with a sly observant roll of 
his tight little eyes, the trick was done almost 
as well as Wardlaw himself could have done 
it. He wanted to strike up an acquaintance 
with John Wardlaw, who was in a most re¬ 
ceptive mood, having anticipated something 
like this the moment he got onto the train. 
That there had been a vacant seat opposite 
was merely accident; sooner or later, between 
Cairo and Port Said, the little yellow man 
would have created a similar situation. 

Rather clumsy, but Wardlaw knew that the 
things to follow would not be. 


41 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

, At noon the Englishmen went in to the 
dining car. Wardlaw, however, had long 
since decided to stick to the compartment for 
the four and a half hours to Port Said. Never 
again would he take his eyes off that kitbag 
until its contents were safely in the purser’s 
keeping. 

“You are returning to japan?” he asked, 
ready to pick up the thread held out by the 
cigarette episode. 

“Oh, yes. I was recently graduated from 
Yale.” 

“Suppose you’ll be glad to see cherry-blos¬ 
soms again and wisteria in the spring.” 

“Oh, yes. I have been away six years.” 

“I often wonder how many Yale students 
there are in Japan. You are all for educa¬ 
tion.” 

The other expanded. Astute and cunning, 
the race has not yet learned to cover the chinks 
in the armor of self-esteem. They are child¬ 
ishly eager for compliments. 

“P. and O. boat?” 

“Oh, yes. My father owns a nursery in 
Yokohama. Here is my card.” 

Wardlaw gravely offered his in return. 

“You will excuse me,” said Mr. Huroki. 
“After all, I think I shall go to the dining 
car. It will be my last opportunity of the 
kind. Will you not join me?” 

“No, thanks. I am waiting until I get on 
board.” 

Mr. Huroki bobbed and took himself off. 
Wardlaw stared at the endless reaches of 
desert sand. 


42 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


To Wardlaw’s mind, Mr. Huroki was play¬ 
ing his game clumsily; and yet he knew that 
in the days close at hand he would have to look 
sharp. There was no bitterness in his heart 
toward Huroki. The Jap would naturally 
do for his cause what he, Wardlaw, was ready 
at all times to do for his. And from the 
Japanese point of view, Huroki had a better 
right in China than had John Wardlaw. It 
was going to be the old story of the survival 
of the fittest. I 

The rest of the journey was uneventful. 
When the train arrived in Port Said, Ward- 
law lowered his kitbags and carried them as 
far as the gangplank, where he beckoned to a 
white-coated steward. 

“Cabin Two-twenty-four, steward. I’ll be 
close at your heels.” 

As the steward started up the gangplank, 
Wardlaw paused. It was not an indecisive 
pause; it was, rather, an abrupt halt. 

There she was, almost within touch of his 
hand, her trim body in pongee, her black hair 
bundled carelessly under a Panama—lovely. 
He liked the set of her shoulders. He liked 
the way she stood up. Alone! It made 
patent her courage and resource. Had he 
fought shy of women all these years because 
he had been less afraid of them than of the 
possibility of becoming attached to one who 
possessed neither of these attributes? He 
hated wishy-washy women, who wanted to 
cling, lean, depend. Of course, a wife would 
mean something; but a comrade, now, like 
this young woman a stride in front of him! i 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


43 

He smiled, for the advice of the professor 
up at Simla came back. “Play the cave-man. 
Pick out one that hasn’t any brother.” His 
imagination caught fire. He would know 
her. He knew that the old failing would 
pounce upon him, that he would stammer, 
stumble and bump into things; but he also 
knew that this time he would stick it out. 

The passengers behind Wardlaw began to 
grumble, and he was forced to continue up the 
gangplank. The unknown seemed to be in 
a hurry, for she firmly elbowed her way ahead 
of others, advising her steward occasionally. 
She reached the deck before Wardlaw and 
disappeared. 

A jam took place in the main companion, 
and Wardlaw found himself in the very 
middle of it. Could he have done so, he would 
have backed out and gone to his cabin through 
the smoke room companion. This ship was 
an old friend, and he knew the lay of her 
decks tolerably well. Only two months gone 
he had crossed the Yellow Sea in her to Yoko¬ 
hama, to make connections with the Pacific 
Mail. 

During this congestion in the main com¬ 
panion, he lost track of the steward who had 
his kitbags; and this set him fretting and fum¬ 
ing until a thoroughfare was established. He 
hurried to his cabin, to find the kitbags on the 
lounge under the port and the regular cabin 
steward puttering about. 

“How do you do, sir?” 

“With you again, George.” 

“Yes, sir. The Captain ordered me to tell 


44 CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 

you to go up to the bridge. He wishes to see 
you.” 

Wardlaw closed the port, locked his door 
and went up to the bridge. Captain Murfree 
hailed him pleasantly. 

“Saw your name on the list, Wardlaw. 
Come and dine with me in my cabin to-night. 
You’ll sit at my table during the voyage?” 

“I certainly shall not.” 

The sailor laughed. “Still shy of squawk¬ 
ing females. Came back rather fast from 
America, didn’t you?” 

“Business.” 

“Then you didn’t get that fishing-trip you 
were talking about?” 

“No—worse luck. What are you looking 
at me like that for?” 

“Am I looking at you like that?” countered 
the sailor humorously. 

“Anything wrong with my tie, or have I 
got my hat on hindside before?” 

“It might happen that I’m only glad to see 
you. Didn’t they feed you well in Cairo?” 

“Shame on me!” Wardlaw laughed in his 
turn. “I’m acting as though I had a grouch. 
My apologies. What time will you be hav¬ 
ing dinner?” 

“Seven-thirty.” 

“I’ll be there, if only for the sake of those 
fat cigars of yours.” 

Wardlaw climbed down the ladder and re¬ 
turned to his cabin. An old traveler, he 
opened one of his kitbags and proceeded to 
hang up his clothes in the locker and lay away 
his shirts and collars in the drawers. 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 45 

The Oriental twilight was falling swiftly 
outside, and so he turned on the lights, selected 
another key from his ring and started to open 
the kitbag he had so carefully guarded. For 
some reason the key did not slip in with its 
usual smoothness. After a third trial, how¬ 
ever, the lock opened, and Wardlaw stretched 
back the frame—and stared down, transfixed 
with bewilderment! 


CHAPTER VI 


W HAT Wardlaw saw would have trans¬ 
fixed any shy bachelor: a pair of long 
golden silk stockings, stretched across an un- 
namable something as white as snow and as 
filmy as fog. From a corner roguishly peeked 
the scarlet tip of a Moroccan slipper. From 
a little bouquet of dried green leaves there 
rose faintly an exquisite perfume—lemon-ver¬ 
bena. Not his kitbag, but a woman’s! It 
was so unaccountable, so absurd a situation, 
that he stared on, hypnotized. 

Subconsciously one thing made an indelible 
impression—the strange and rather sinister 
similarity between this kitbag and his own. 
Label for label, it was almost the exact coun¬ 
terpart of the kitbag which was at this mo¬ 
ment the most precious thing in the world. 
And while his subconsciousness went on print¬ 
ing and storing away the amazing fact of the 
resemblance, his whole conscious thought was 
focused upon those silk stockings. 

“Good Lord!” 

Some subtle inner warning galvanized him 
into immediate action. He shut the frame 
swiftly, caught the handles and dashed out of 
the cabin into the companion. Two minutes 
later he burst into the purser’s office.. 

46 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 47 

“There’s been a mistake somewhere. Some 
woman has got my kitbag, and I’ve got hers!” 
he announced breathlessly. 

The purser laughed. “Your kitbag just 
turned up. The lady seemed quite as excited 
as you. The bags certainly look alike. Here 
you are, Mr. Wardlaw. Fault of one of the 
stewards, probably.” 

Overjoyed, Wardlaw swung his bag off the 
counter and without question marched off to 
his cabin. But the sweat was beginning to 
flow from the roots of his hair. 

“I’m in luck, and no mistake!” 

He lifted the bag to the lounge and opened 
it. He flung the contents about haphazardly 
until the bag was cleared. The bottom looked 
innocent enough. At each corner was a brass¬ 
headed nail. He pressed the two at one end 
and raised the leather, revealing a secret bot¬ 
tom. Reposing snugly in this bottom was a 
black leather portfolio. Japan would have 
given a million out of hand for the secret it 
held. The sigh Wardlaw released came from 
the bottom of his heart. A narrow squeak. 
He drew his free hand across his forehead. 
He would put an end to all this fuss and worry 
by placing the portfolio in the purser’s safe 
at once. 

The Japs were after him—not the least 
doubt of that. But how much they knew was 
another matter. Certainly Carrington would 
have tipped his hint anonymously. Other¬ 
wise a bit of backfire would mark his com¬ 
mercial downfall. If it should be learned 
that he had given away a secret like this, 


4 8 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

merely to make the merger possible, the Street 
would never trust him again. “Watch your 
kitbags,” Ainslee had warned without the 
least idea of what they contained. That was 
like the old boy, who was sometimes known as 
Old Details. Wardlaw deduced that Car¬ 
rington had mentioned his kitbags to the Jap¬ 
anese Consulate in Naples. Nothing more 
would be necessary. Since the Hu-peh canal 
deal, the Japanese secret service had taken 
peculiar interest in the doings of John Ward- 
law, civil engineer. 

For several years he had carried these kit¬ 
bags, and both had secret bottoms. The idea 
had come to him originally because of the 
pestiferous curiosity of the natives. World 
over, they had to pry into things, not with any 
idea of stealing, but because of that inherent 
curiosity to see “the white man’s things.” 
First, he had stowed away his correspondence 
and money in these compartments. Then 
hazardous journeys came, when it was of the 
utmost importance to keep his affairs from 
the knowledge of rival concerns. 

Only one other person knew of the existence 
of these secret bottoms—Flenry Ainslee. It 
had occurred to Wardlaw that he might some 
day be laid away by accident, and some one 
in authority must know w T here he kept his val¬ 
uable papers. Naturally he took Ainslee into 
his confidence. 

He dressed for dinner, whistling snatches 
from half-forgotten light operas. Occasion¬ 
ally, though, his hands would pause and his 
eyes become fixed. Lemon-verbena! Strange, 


49 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

but of all perfumes that was his favorite—that 
and lavender—sweet, natural perfumes which 
never insisted upon being recognized, which 
when detected seemed instantly to vanish in 
sheer modesty. 

At length he finished dressing, picked up 
the portfolio, balanced it thoughtfully on his 
hand, made as though to open it, reconsidered, 
snuggled it under his arm and once more 
sought the purser. 

“I wish to deposit this with you, if you 
please.” The purser accepted the portfolio 
and extended his signature-book, which Ward- 
law signed. “I am going to ask you for a 
receipt.” 

.“Not necessary, Mr. Wardlaw.” 

“I prefer it—in case I might not be able to 
sign your book.” 

“Oh, I see. Might miss the boat some¬ 
where along the route.” 

“You never can tell,” said Wardlaw. 

“Good evening.” 

“Ah! Good evening, Mr Huroki,” re 
turned Wardlaw genially. He looked down 
into the burning black eyes of the Jap. “How 
is Dai Nippon?” 

“The pearl of Japan— Hondo! Is not my 
country beautiful?” Huroki thrust forward 
a small bag of gold and a letter of credit. “In 
a few months—cherry-blossoms! I shall 
never forget my first sight of ripe cherries in 
your country.” He signed the book. “Do 
you play auction?” 

“Whenever I get the chance,” said Ward- 
law. He now could play any game that came 





50 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


along. The O. C. C. would go along, no mat¬ 
ter what befell him. 

“Suppose we start a game to-night?” was 
Huroki’s suggestion. 

“That depends upon how long the Captain 
keeps me in his cabin,” answered Wardlaw, 
stuffing the receipt into the unused watch- 
pocket in the top of his trousers. I am dining 
with him to-night.” 

“I shall be in the smoke room all the 
evening.” 

“Now, I wonder!” mused the purser as 
Huroki stepped outside. 

“About what?” asked Wardlaw, happy and 
light of heart. 

“Why that Jap has been hanging around 
here for more than an hour. The moment 
you came in, he followed.” 

“Met him on the train, and he’s looking to 
me for a game of bridge. All educated Japs 
have gone mad over auction. It’s putting Go 
on the shelf. Thanks.” Wardlaw swung 
out of the office. 

The purser stooped before his safe and care¬ 
fully studied the portfolio intrusted to his 
care. He turned it over and over. 

“Bally odd, if you should ask me. But it’s 
none of my business. What’s his idea of a 
receipt? Not necessary.” 

Wardlaw presented himself at the Cap¬ 
tain’s door at seven-thirty, and was cheerily 
bidden to enter. 

“How’s your appetite?” 

“It’s particularly keen. In fact, I’m 
starved.” 




CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 


5i 


“Soup, Rao!” cried the Captain to his hand¬ 
some Cingalese servant. 

Wardlaw thoroughly enjoyed that dinner; 
it was just the kind of an affair he needed after 
all this tension. Nevertheless his efferves¬ 
cence fell steadily. By the time the Captain 
had passed his marvelous cigars, Ward law's 
gayety consisted mainly of vocal affirmatives 
and short nods. The sailor dug into his short 
gray beard thoughtfully. 

“What’s on your mind?” 

“Lots.” 

“You started out fine; but the barometer’s 
acting queerly. What kind of lots?” 

“Battle, murder, and sudden death,” ans¬ 
wered Wardlaw; but he said it lightly. “I’ve 
been thinking.” 

“Better be careful. If you think in this 
part of the world, you’re likely never to get 
the kink out,” the Captain bantered. 

Wardlaw took out a sealed envelope which 
he studied for a moment; then passed it over 
to the sailor. “A favor. I want you to put 
this in your private safe. There’s a receipt 
inside for something I’ve left with the pur¬ 
ser. Now, if anything should happen to me 
while I’m aboard your old hooker—if I 
shouldn’t turn up for breakfast some fine 
morning—you will send a wireless to this 
na^me and address. When the boat reaches 
Hong Kong, you will give the addressee this 
envelope and explain to the purser.” 

“Happen to you? What the deuce do you 
mean?” 

“Sorry, but I can’t explain.” 




52 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


“Are you spoofing me?” 

“I am very serious. I’m in danger, but I 
haven’t the least idea what this danger is or 
from which way it will come. It may not 
materialize at all; but I must guard against 
the possibility.” 

“On my ship?” 

“On any ship I sail on. I can’t tell you 
any more.” 

“Somebody after the original package?” 

“Something like that. The only way you 
can help me is to put this envelope in your 
safe and remember my instructions regard¬ 
ing it.” 

“No sooner said than done. Queer old 
world, these parts. All right. If you won’t 
tell me, you won’t.” 

“Where do you get these cigars?” asked 
Wardlaw irrelevantly. 

“Gibraltar. Little two-by-four shop the 
tourist hasn’t discovered yet. I’ll follow out 
your instructions. And if at any time you 
need help, come to me. Take a fistfull of 
those cigars and come along up to the bridge 
with me.” 

“I’m restless. I’ll trot around the decks. 
Thanks for a bully good dinner.” 

As Wardlaw stepped over the threshold, the 
Captain beckoned to his Cingalese servant. 

“Rao, that gentleman is Wardlaw Sahib. 
You remember him. When you are of! duty 
I want you to watch him—take note of all 
who approach him. Watch out for people 
who seem to be watching him. Wardlaw 
Sahib is my friend.” 




CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


53 


“Yessir!” 

“And report to me every night.” 

“Yessir!” 

“He’s just gone out to starboard. You 
might take a peek at his back. I’ll have a 
steward sent in to clean up.” 

The barefooted Cingalese went out at once, 
and from afar watched Wardlaw, who was 
leaning against the rail smoking. Perhaps 
half an hour passed without either Wardlaw 
or the Cingalese moving. Promenaders passed 
and repassed, but none of them stopped. At 
length a woman dropped out and stood by the 
rail perhaps half a dozen feet from Wardlaw. 
The Cingalese watched her closely, but she 
never turned her head; she simply stared at 
the opal mists of the desert. Even after 
Wardlaw tossed away the end of his cigar and 
left the rail, the Cingalese remained at his 
post of observation, no doubt held there by the 
subtle attraction of the pearly half-moon of 
the woman’s shoulders. When she finally 
moved on, the Cingalese padded back to the 
Captain’s cabin. 

Entering the smoke room, his soul filled 
with an odd temptation—the desire to play ' 
with danger, to court it, now that nothing 
could stop the big wheels from turning to 
their prescribed ends—Wardlaw accepted 
Huroki’s invitation to play a few rubbers of 
auction. Where were Huroki’s comrades? 
Steerage-passengers, doubtless; and doubtless 
he had nothing to fear physically from Hur- 
oki and everything to fear from the men in 
the steerage. 


54 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


Sometimes, when he took the “dummy,” 
Wardlaw’s thoughts broke away from the 
game. He knew he was going to meet her. 
But how? Would he turn tail the last mo¬ 
ment? The fact that he had vowed to meet 
her gave to the venture a kind of sportsman¬ 
ship; and because he was a thorough sports¬ 
man, he was determined to play his bid. 
Will-power, the professor had said. Had he 
ever really used it against his imbecile bash¬ 
fulness? Only once that he could remember, 
and the memory wasn't a pleasant one. 

“Your deal, Mr. Wardlaw.” 

“Beg pardon!” 

Never before had any woman attracted him 
like this one. He had seen women quite as 
beautiful, quite as alluring, but the magnet 
had never been powerful enough to perform 
a greater miracle than to excite his imagina¬ 
tion and wistfulness. 

By the time he had lost three rubbers and 
became aware of Huroki’s chagrin, Ward- 
law awoke to the fact that he was playing 
auction in the most mechanical manner. He 
pushed the cards to the centre of the table. 

“No more for me, gentlemen. I’m spoil¬ 
ing a good game. Not up to the mark.” 

He was rising from his chair, when an odd 
expression on Huroki’s face caught his at¬ 
tention. The Japanese was staring at the 
opened port behind Wardlaw, who turned in¬ 
stinctively. For a space not more than the 
intake of a breath, he gazed into two calm, in¬ 
curious gray eyes. Most women would have 
been startled by the suddenness of his turn. 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


_ 55 

* 

Unagitated—at least outwardly—this one 
turned away. In another woman Wardlaw 
would have described this superior calmness 
as boldness. Not a flutter of an eyelid; a 
glance, and she was gone, without the slight¬ 
est indication of precipitancy. 

Huroki laughed. “The lady has been 
watching us for ten minutes.” 

“And I frightened her away!” said Ward- 
law, smiling. 

He went outside tingling. But the desire 
to give chase was short-lived. Still afraid of 
them, wasn’t he! 

The trip down the Red Sea to Aden was 
uneventful, save for a minor incident. At 
night he left the cabin door open the length of 
the hook-latch to catch what currents of air 
there were in the companions. One night, as 
he lay in his bunk dreaming with his eyes 
open, he heard the latch rattle, then fall with 
a little smack against the door. Instantly he 
flooded the cabin with light, swung out of the 
bunk and dashed into the companion. He 
had a fleeting glimpse of a Lascar. At least 
the prowler wore a brown rag of a turban. 
Still, the trespasser was rather too squat and 
chunky to pass as a Lascar, proverbially thin. 
A Jap? And after that receipt? 

Her name was Allison. He had found that 
out from the dining room chart. And she 
sat at the Captain’s table, at his right; and the 
old sea-dog rarely failed to occupy his chair 
at dinner. From his seat at the Doctor’s 
table Wardlaw watched her. He could do so 
without turning his head. The Captain— 


56 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

who, as Wardlaw knew, was rather hard to 
please—evidently found her to his liking. 
From soup to dessert there was always a broad 
grin on his weather-roughened face. Often 
now before dinner Wardlaw would observe 
the two promenading arm in arm. So he 
maneuvered skillfully to pass them, the orig¬ 
inal idea being to watch for a sign from the 
sailor. But there was never anything more 
than a cheery salute. 

Wardlaw arraigned himself bitterly. There 
was nothing in the world to prevent him from 
boldly asking the Captain to present him— 
nothing but the lack of boldness. He knew 
that there was no aloofness on the Captain’s 
part. Times without number he had given 
the Captain the same impression he had given 
the world at large—that he did not care for 
the companionship of women. 

On the afternoon of the second day out 
from Aden—about three, when passengers 
are snoozing, when every one is off duty but 
the steersman and the Chinese stokers, when 
stewards and stewardesses are generally play¬ 
ing hooky—Wardlaw left the stuffy smoke 
room and went down to his cabin to replenish 
his pouch, which was empty. 

He grasped the handle of the door, turned 
and pushed. The door did not open. He 
thought that singular. He had certainly left 
the door unlocked when he had gone up to 
lunch. The little companion was dim. He 
bent toward the keyhole to find the key rest¬ 
ing in the lock. Absentmindedness—he had 
evidently locked the door without being con- 








CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 57 

scious of the act. A mighty good thing for 
him that he had taken the portfolio to the 
purser. He turned the key and pushed the 
door inward. 

In the middle of the cabin, her hands 
clutching a magnificent peacock kimono about 
her throat, her hair disheveled and her gray 
eyes as wide as they possibly could be—stood 
Miss Allison! 


CHAPTER VII 


W ARDLAW’S surprise is not to be de¬ 
scribed by any word-picture. It was so 
tremendous that it went beyond the bounds of 
ordinary definition. Locked in his cabin! 
In the most gorgeous kimono he had even 
seen, her very dishevelment accentuating her 
loveliness! He was conscious of that, any¬ 
how. But he was not conscious of the fact 
that when a woman is beautiful in dishevel¬ 
ment, the last word has been said in testimony. 

How long the tableau lasted neither was 
ever able to determine. A worldly-wise man 
—or rather a man versed in the ways of 
women—would have been first to break it. 
The advantage was all on Wardlaw’s side. 
Vaguely this thought percolated through his 
bewilderment, but he could not find any ver¬ 
bal handle to it. Locked in his cabin! His 
mental processes began and ended with that. 

Shrewdly reasoning out his mental condi¬ 
tion, the young woman recovered first. 

“I began to believe I should never get out,” 
she said. “Where are the stewards? I rang 
and rang. I have been here fully an hour.” 
“An hour?” he repeated stupidly. 

“It is horribly embarrassing,” she went on, 
a little more rapidly, her fingers tightening 
in the soft folds of the kimono. “It was all 
done so suddenly that I forgot to call out.” 

58 





CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


59 


Wardlaw stared on. 

“You are Captain Wardlaw. I am Miss 
Allison. My cabin is opposite. I was read¬ 
ing. My door was open to catch what air 
there was, when I saw a man slink into this 
cabin. I instantly concluded that a Lascar 
had no business here; so I got up and ran 
across. He was going through your things. 
Evidently he did not hear my approach. 
When I seized him by the arm, he swung 
violently about, flung me against the bunk, 
transferred the key, and the thing was done 
before I could recover my balance. But he 
wasn’t a Lascar; he was a Japanese.” 

“A Japanese?” 

A little red slipper began to pat the floor 
impatiently. “I can easily imagine your as¬ 
tonishment. I hope you will do me the honor 
to imagine mine.” The smile, however, was 
rather propitiating. 

“Good heavens!”—and with this homely 
ejaculation, Wardlaw broke through his 
trance. “A thousand pardons for my stu¬ 
pidity!” 

“Granted. I was never more glad to see 
any one. I couldn’t call from the port. I 
just had to wait; and it wasn’t an enjoyable 
ordeal. I believe your bell-wires have been 
cut. I rang long enough.” 

Wardlaw stepped inside, climbed into the 
upper bunk and inspected the molding which 
covered the wires. 

“They are cut. Now, I wonder when they 
did that? The bell was all right early this 
morning. Lucky I needed some tobacco, Miss 


6 o CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


Allison, or you’d have had to stay here until I 
came down to dress for dinner. It was mighty 
good of you to take all this trouble. It would 
have been simpler had you rung your own 
bell.” 

“I thought of that—when it was too late. 
I don’t believe he took anything.” 

“It wouldn’t matter if he had.” 

He stood aside, and as she passed, she gave 
him a friendly nod. As the door of her cabin 
closed, he stared at it thoughtfully, then closed 
his own—and executed a light fantastic which, 
due to a sudden beam roll, toppled him against 
the wash-bowl. 

Of all the bizarre introductions! And 
nothing could have happened more to his ad¬ 
vantage. He had met her, talked with her. 
and shared an adventure which was intimately 
their own. All the foreground—and it was 
in crossing this foreground that Wardlaw en¬ 
countered his main difficulty in regard to 
women—which must be covered from intro¬ 
duction to genuine acquaintance, done away 
with in such an unforgettable manner! 

Why, so far as he was concerned, heaven 
bless the meddling Jap! 

Clever of Huroki to entice him into the 
smoke room each afternoon and evening so 
that his subordinates might have plenty of 
time to search the cabin. After that receipt, 
and they would keep after it so long as they 
believed it to be in his possession. And he 
couldn’t very well declare his hand by drop¬ 
ping the hint that the receipt was in the Cap¬ 
tain’s private safe. 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


61 


He was reasonably certain that Huroki was 
working blindly on the supposition that some¬ 
thing of immeasurable value to the Japanese 
Government was in John Wardlaw’s posses¬ 
sion. Otherwise Huroki would not have 
bothered him; he would have sent his infor¬ 
mation to Tokio, and a callous thumb would 
have reached out and pressed down upon 
Peking so hard that it would be difficult for 
an American to purchase a chow dog. 

Another thought rather chilled Wardlaw. 
He knew from experience that the Jap was 
prone to speculate dispassionately upon the 
future. Eventually unable to find anything 
in John Wardlaw’s cabin or on his person, 
they might speculate on the supposition that 
it would be better for Japan’s commercial 
future if a certain civil engineer disappeared 
permanently from the haunts of men. Next 
to finding out the truth, a delay would best 
serve. 

So! He just had to get to Hong Kong. 
No shore-leave, and his chin toward his 
shoulder from now on. 

How supremely beautiful she was! No 
hysterics, no outward sign of fright, the glance 
from her great gray eyes unshaken by a sit¬ 
uation which would have appalled an ordi¬ 
nary woman. Agitated, yes, but not through 
fear. And now he could approach her as 
easily as though he had known her all his life. 
It was wonderful. 

It seemed to him that he had finally em¬ 
erged, that the old-time barriers had been 
blown away. When he went into dinner, 


62 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


later, he smiled warmly at his table-mates. 
The sense of buoyancy was so strangely new 
that he bubbled. 

Doctor Phillipson eyed him interestedly. 
He had never seen Wardlaw effervesce before, 
and tried to reason out the cause. He had 
known Wardlaw for several years, and many 
a rubber they had played together at the club 
in Hong Kong. A quiet man, with a dry 
humor and an even temper nothing seemed 
able to ruffle; and this effervescence sat oddly 
upon him. Once he followed Wardlaw’s 
wandering gaze, and discovered a lovely pro¬ 
file. But this glance had to be repeated many 
times before the Doctor permitted himself to 
hazard a guess. What, Wardlaw? That 
would be fine business. The old woman- 
hater! Had he put his finger into the web 
at last? 

Toward the end of the dinner a steward 
leaned over Wardlaw’s shoulder and whis¬ 
pered that the Captain would be pleased to 
see him in the cabin for coffee. 

Wardlaw accepted the invitation readily. 
He wanted to ask the Captain a thousand ques¬ 
tions, questions until now he had not had the 
courage to voice. But he did not have the op¬ 
portunity to ask them that night. One does 
not ask questions relative to the third person 
when the third person is present. 

“Miss Allison has consented to join us, Mr. 
Wardlaw.” That was the Captain’s way of 
introducing them. 

“We have met before,” said Miss Allison 
gravely. But there was a flash of whimsical 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 63 

humor in her eyes that put Wardlaw unbe¬ 
lievably at his ease. It thrilled him, too. 
For what did that flash convey but the un¬ 
spoken words: “We have a little secret, you 
and I, but we sha’n’t share it with any¬ 
body?” 

At nine, having drunk the Captain’s coffee 
and inspected his collection of chrysoprase, 
Wardlaw and Miss Allison went down to the 
promenade deck. 

“Shall we walk a bit?” she suggested. 

“Yes, let’s walk!”—with boyish eagerness. 

He had been wondering, once they reached 
the deck, what he should do, how he should 
act, and this suggestion solved the difficulty. 
It even put a halt to the return of the old shy¬ 
ness. Things had gone smoothly enough, with 
the old sailor to bolster up the lapses, but how 
to act when alone with her was another mat¬ 
ter. And yet, above all things, he wanted to 
be alone with her. He did not inquire into 
the reason as the hour was still to come where¬ 
in all these unusual new stirrings would merge 
into one stupendous fact. 

“Suppose we go up to the bow and watch 
the phosphorescence break against the cut¬ 
water ? it is wonderful sometimes when we 
run into a school of flying-fish. They look like 
fish of fire. Of course you have seen it many 
times.” 

“And never tire of it. But you seem to be 
an old traveler.” 

“I’ve gone about some. I love the sea. I 
like to look off. Cities bother me; I can’t 
breathe deeply, surrounded by brick.” 



64 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

They did not speak again until they stood 
looking down the cutwater. Waves of fire 
rolled on each side. Presently they entered a 
school of flying-fish—for they also fly at night 
—and the fireworks began. The young woman 
uttered little cries of pleasure, and often flung 
downward a bare arm to direct his gaze to¬ 
ward beautiful curls of living water. 

He fell to wondering how it possibly could 
be. Here he was, for the first time in his life, 
in a situation which formerly would have 
tied his tongue and shaken his knees, feeling 
and acting like a normal human being. So 
many years wasted, so many simple pleasures 
like this lost because of his abysmal idiocy. 

As though there were two Wardlaws, he 
heard the other recounting an experience on 
an atoll in the lagoon of which flying-fish 
spawned. Night after night the whole la¬ 
goon had sparkled with blue fire, and always 
at a certain hour appeared the sinister fin of 
a marauding shark. 

“And so you are Captain Wardlaw!” she 
said suddenly. “I have been hearing about 
you.” 

“Captain tell you I was a grouch?” , 

“Indeed, no! He said you would be per¬ 
fect but for one thing.” 

“And what was that?” | 

“I haven’t been able to get him to reveal 
that.” She laughed joyously. “And you’re 
the man who built the Kotun Bridge!” 

Subtle flattery! He wouldn’t have been 
human if he had not expanded under it. 

“You have really seen it, then?” 




CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 65 

1 # “I have. It was a wonderful bit of en¬ 
gineering.” 

“It was great sport, anyhow. I like to 
tackle jobs like that.” 

“Liking makes a great many things possi¬ 
ble. Look! there’s a porpoise!” 

When the fire died away, he spoke. “How 
small this world is! I first saw you in a 
theatre in New York.” 

' “You did?” 

“When I saw you on the Cretic , I was rather 
'startled. When you came into the dining 
room at Shepheard’s the other night, I was 
dumfounded. When I saw you walking up 
the gangplank at Port Said—well, I haven’t 
got any more adjectives.” 

“It must have looked odd. Coincidences 
have a way of mystifying us. Well, we did 
not have to wait for any one to introduce us.” 

“I must have acted like a yokel.” 

“On the contrary, you were very nice about 
it. I never saw any one quite so surprised as 
you were.” 

“I’m mighty glad it happened. Another 
man would have known you long ago.” 

“I doubt that. Perhaps I did not want to 
meet any one—until now. You never saw 
me speak to any one on the Cretic, did you?” 

“I can’t recollect that I did.” 

“I’m a moody individual. My own 
thoughts, sometimes, are very good company. 
I am used to silences.” 

“So am I; but I cannot say that I am fond 
of them.” 

She held out her wrist-watch toward the 


66 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


moon. “Eleven o’clock! The time has 
passed very quickly.” She turned away from 
the cutwater. 

So—reluctantly on his part—they returned 
to the promenade deck. The turbaned figure 
behind the windlass stood up and stifled a 
yawn. 

Wardlaw turned in, his whole view of life 
radically changed. He wasn’t going to be 
afraid of them any more. What wonderful 
creatures they were, close up! And there 
was an added charm of mystery about her. 
Whither was she bound, and upon what 
errand? 

Across the way the subject of these cogita¬ 
tions did not go to bed at once. She knelt on 
the lounge and stared out of the port for a 
long time. The expression on her face was 
dreamy, but not to a translatable degree. By 
and by she sighed, slid off the lounge and 
stood before the mirror. Her gray eyes gazed 
back at her somberly. 

“Cheat!” she whispered. 

She undressed and put on her kimono and 
sat on the edge of the bunk. She flung loose 
her hair, and the glossy black coils spread and 
rippled to her knees. Slowly she began to 
brush it—and she smiled. A child, seeing 
that smile, would have run to her with open 
arms. 

It was one o’clock when she turned out the 
lights. 

Mr. Huroki went to bed about the same 
time. His blank face was quite as blank as 
usual; but the occasional gesture, the flash 





CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 67 

from his tightly bound eyes, would have 
warned another of his race that Mr. Huroki 
was in a towering rage about something. 

On the following night, at eleven-thirty, 
Wardlaw stepped out of the smoke room and 
began his usual mile walk around the decks. 
His stride was springy, for his heart was light. 
A wonderful day! They had had luncheon 
abaft the smoke room, tea with the Captain, 
and had gone up to the bow after dinner. She 
was glorious. He was no longer diffident. 
The change which had taken place in him, 
all within forty hours, was really amazing. 
She made it so easy for him that it seemed as 
if he had known her all his life. 

The deck was white with moonshine, and 
as he came down to port side, the ventilators 
and funnels threw dead black shadows across 
the silvered teak, shortening and lengthening 
to the gentle roll. 

He was in the act of passing a cluster of 
ventilators when two shadowy forms sprang 
out from behind them. His lively backward 
movement was anticipated by a sinewy foot. 
A second later he lay helpless on his back. 


CHAPTER VIII 


TNSTANTLY Wardlaw relaxed. The pe- 
A culiar strain on his arms, which were be¬ 
ing held extended beyond his head, and the 
numbness below his knees, convinced him that 
he had been thrown by a trick of ju-jitsu and 
that if he struggled, a broken arm might be 
the result. Besides, he had nothing in his 
pockets worth a struggle. 

He lay in a black shadow, and he could ' 
see but little—the few stars low in the west, 
and the dim outline of the man who held his 
legs by kneeling on them. Of the man who 
held his arms he could see nothing. 

Swiftly and systematically a hand went 
through his pockets, all of them. Then he 
was released, suddenly. By the time he got 
to his feet, the deck was empty. They had 
left his money and watch, but every scrap of 
paper was gone, even the letter he had started 
to scribble on that night in the Shepheard 
dining room. 

He appreciated the utter uselessness of re¬ 
porting the affair and going down into the 
steerage. Well as he knew them, all Japs 
looked alike in the dark. He would never 
be able to identify either of his assailants. 
And not finding what they sought—the receipt 
for the portfolio—they would immediately 
destroy what they had stolen. 


CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 69 

\ He proceeded to the nearest companion and 
limped down to his cabin, chagrined. They 
had caught him napping. Hereafter he would 
jtake his constitutional when others were about. 
He owed it to Ainslee not to grow care¬ 
less. The hard part of it would be that he 
wouldn’t dare leave the old hooker until he 
reached Hong Kong; and a night in Colom¬ 
bo was worth a thousand in Bagdad, these 
days. 

And what a surprise he would have for the 
old Boy when the proper time came! 

As he lay in his bunk, another thought came 
to him. Supposing Carrington took it into 
his head to play up with the Japs? He had 
said “Five years,” and Carrington would 
know what that meant. Supposing then, that 
Carrington was aiming to put his ow r n hands 
upon the contents of that portfolio, later, k 
under the General Construction Company’s 
flag, to play it fifty-fifty with some Japanese 
firm? Carrington had, by tipping the Japs, 
proved that he was equal to such a game. The 
Open Door meant little or nothing to the 
O. C. C. supply man. Money—that was the 
keystone of his existence. So John Wardlaw 
must get to Hong Kong. 

Why hadn’t he brought O’Holleran along? 
The boy was a born Lecocq; and he had the 
Irishman’s love for mystery and intrigue, 
which John Wardlaw had not. 

“I can build with the best of them; but I’m 
a mollycoddle at this game. And I just as 
good as told Carrington what we chaps had 
done!” 


70 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

He turned the pillow over, found a cool 
spot on it and fell asleep. 

It soon became evident to everybody on 
board that Miss Allison was going out of her 
way to be pleasant to Wardlaw, and he was 
the last to realize that. 

When a pretty woman sets out to engage a 
man, she generally succeeds. When she is 
beautiful and skillful, her success is unmodi¬ 
fied; it is absolute. The latent and inexpress¬ 
ible gallantry in him awoke, and began to 
press outward, groping. He was a most will¬ 
ing victim—and if the glances of the British 
officers meant anything, an envied one. 

Shuffle-board, rummy, Canfield, books, tea, 
walks; sometimes she read aloud to him; 
sometimes it was the first dog-watch up in the 
bow, when the porpoises were at play. With 
a man’s usual vanity he became elated with 
the idea that he was conquering himself. He 
began to confide in her, told her about those 
lonely years and the cause. But he never 
spoke of his work unless she laid traps for 
him; and even then, half the time he sensed 
the traps and shied away. 

The day before they landed at Colombo, he 
was profoundly stirred by an incident which 
outwardly seemed trivial enough. He had, 
with his usual guilelessness, long since de¬ 
cided that because she wore no gold band she 
was unattached. How was he to know that 
in these benighted times women lay aside their 
wedding-rings in order not to fall prey to an 
old-time superstition? 

They were sitting in their steamer-chairs in 







CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 71 

I 

a corner of the boat-deck when one of the deck 
stewards approached her with a wireless. 

“Will you excuse me?” she said to Ward- 
law. 

“Certainly.” He rose and went over to 
the rail. Scarcely two minutes passed before 
she hailed him to return. 

“Will you be so good as to throw these 
scraps overboard?” 

He cupped his hands and she poured the 
minute scraps into the cup. He could not 
avoid noting the strange fire in her eyes, and 
he was sure that her hands trembled a little. 
Once more he went to the rail and flung the 
bits to the purpose of the wind. The flakes 
swooped, rose and soared; particles fluttered 
back to the ship and played a game of hide 
and seek among the ventilators. He returned 
to his chair. 

He presently discovered that he could talk 
on one subject and think strongly on another. 
What he talked about were atolls; what he 
thought about were wireless messages. Was 
there some one back in the far country who 
had the right to send her wireless messages? 
Was this the first message or one of many? 
Never having been jealous, he was not fa¬ 
miliar with the symptoms. He could not 
shut out the fire in her eyes; and by and by he 
began to find verbal navigation rather diffi¬ 
cult. 

“Don’t you like to talk of your work?” she 
asked suddenly. 

“Why—sometimes.” 

“But you’re afraid that a butterfly such as 


72 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS ” 

I am would not understand? Perhaps not all 
the technicalities. But a woman likes to hear 
a man tell of his own adventures, when they 
have been worth while, like yours.” 

“Adventures? All that was cut-and-dried 
stuff. You’re trying to make it romantic.” 

“Work and romance are inseparable, 
though only poets comprehend that.” 

“That’s like all poetry; musical but imprac¬ 
tical. By the way, had you ever met that Jap 
Huroki before? I saw you chatting with 
him to-day.” 

“A chance acquaintance. I call him the 
Cork,” she replied, laughing. “He bobs and 
bobs. But he has a wonderful knowledge of 
trees and flowers, and that always interests 
me.” 

“I know a sunflower from a hollyhock— 
that is, I used to; and that’s about all.” 

“But you built the Kotun Bridge, the An¬ 
daman Breakwater, and the Hu-peh canals; 
and that’s worth many gardens of flowers. 
Monuments! I’d rather build monuments 
than rose-gardens; only I’m a woman, and 
women’s monuments are their children.” 

“You’re not a suffragette, then?” 

“I’m too busy.” 

“With what?” he asked thoughtlessly. 

“That’s my secret. We women generally 
carry one or more.” And she eyed him ob¬ 
liquely. “I suppose you’re going forward 
on another adventure.” 

“Work,” he corrected. “I’m afraid the 
Captain’s been filling your ears with a lot of 
nonsense.” 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


73 

“No. That’s for younger men,” she re¬ 
plied with an enigmatical smile. “There 
goes the first call for dinner. Till then!” She 
picked up her books. 

After she was gone, he remained in her 
chair for several minutes. Finally he rose, 
sighing. Some one back home had the right 
to send her wireless messages! 

As he passed the ventilators, he espied two 
bits of paper. He paused and stared down 
at them somberly. Ordinarily he would have 
gone on, but something impelled him to pick 
up those scraps which he recognized as be¬ 
longing to the wireless she had received. He 
smothered his conscience, for it went against 
the grain to act like this. But the impellant 
was too strong; it was irresistible. On the 
first scrap he read the word Car, on the sec¬ 
ond, China . And the weight of a thousand 
years slipped from his shoulders. No lover 
would talk about China. He stuffed the bits 
of paper into his vest pocket—because they 
had once been touched by her. 

They dropped anchor in the lovely harbor 
of Colombo at three the following afternoon. 
Many of the tourists were going to spend the 
night ashore, and the agents from the hotels 
had their hands full the moment they came up 
the ladder. 

“I’ve got a room at the Galle Face,” said 
Miss Allison exuberantly. 

“I’m not going ashore,” Wardlaw replied. 

“Come in for the evening, anyway. Let’s 
have dinner together, dance a little, and then 
you can return.” 


74 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

“But I can’t dance.” 

“It’s fun just watching.” 

“Sorry, but I’ve decided this voyage not to 
go ashore.” 

“Not even for dinner with me?” 

“Ordinarily I’d go to the North Pole to 
dine with you.” 

“That wouldn’t be half so pleasant as the 
Galle Face. Please!” 

“No.” 

“Why?” she demanded. 

“Because it is barely possible that if I went 
ashore I might never come back.” 

“What do you mean by that?” 

“Away up back of Perak in Malacca there 
is a strange religious cult. The layman never 
sees these priests at worship. Just before they 
gather at the temple, they beat drums to 
warn away the layman. And woe to the 
trespasser! Perhaps I hear them.” 

“What a curious idea! You don’t strike 
me as being superstitious. Come along and 
have dinner with me; and I’ll promise to 
watch over you.” 

“How I’d like to go! No.” 

“Are you really in some kind of dan¬ 
ger?” There was genuine anxiety in her 
tones. 

“On my word, I don’t know. That is all I 
can tell you. Go and have a good time, and 
tell me all about it to-morrow.” 

“This is the first time I’ve ever been refused 
like this. It’s rather a novelty to find a man 
who can say No—and stick. I don’t usually 
ask men to dine with me.” 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


75 


“I will give all I possess to be without re¬ 
sponsibility at this moment.” 

“A mystery! You are embarked upon an 
adventure, then? That lightens my sense of 
chagrin. I shall write down in my diary: 
‘Captain Wardlaw refused to go ashore with 
me. A mysterious responsibility kept him on 
board ship.’ Don’t think you have offended 
me. You haven’t. It takes a proper man to 
say no—to me. Good-by!” 

As the tender drew away, she waved her 
hand cheerily. The women behind her, ob¬ 
serving the act, shrugged and eyed each other 
significantly. A ship on a long voyage is quite 
as bad as the veranda of a summer hotel. 

Miss Allison engaged a rickshaw and rode 
about town until six, then went out on the 
lovely red road to the Galle Face Hotel, 
where she dined alone. She was perfectly 
well aware of her status in the minds of the 
other women, but this only quickened her 
sense of humor. 

At nine-thirty she returned to town, walked 
out to the end of the jetty and engaged a native 
boatman to row her back to the ship. 

Meanwhile the Captain’s Cingalese servant 
made a report that night. 

“Wardlaw Sahib is always with the Mem- 
sahib.” 

“H’m!” mused the sailor. “Then he may 
be in danger after all.” 

“The man Huroki watches him often. He 
has dealings with two of his people in the 
steerage. He was angry the other night with 
one of them. Wardlaw Sahib’s cabin stew- 


76 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

ard says he has detected a Japanese prowling 
about the companion. Wardlaw Sahib did 
not go ashore to-night. But Huroki did.” 

“Where is the Memsahib?” 

“She went ashore at five. That is all I 
have to report.” 

“Not enough to worry the galley cat.” 

At eleven o’clock Wardlaw leaned with his 
arms on the starboard rail of the boat-dick— 
in the little projection between two boats— 
and viewed the twinkling lights of Colombo. 
Each time the revolving light flashed eastward 
he saw a carved temple-top stand out vividly 
for an instant. Shadows passed to and fro 
across the gray water, where the reflections 
of ship lights danced on ripples stirred by the 
northeast trade. 

Why, in the name of the seven wonders, 
hadn’t he gone ashore with her? Would she 
be offended? Sheer stupidity; but that was 
John Wardlaw. He would have been far 
safer with her in a crowd than here, alone. 

“Take care!” cried a woman’s voice. 

The next instant it seemed to Wardlaw that 
the bottom of the world had fallen out and 
he was going down—down—down! 


CHAPTER IX 


W HEN the sensation of going down 
ceased, that of ascension immediately be¬ 
gan. Wardlaw felt himself carried through 
a blackness so dense that he had to fight for 
his breath. Then—pop!—he was back into 
the real world again. He opened his eyes to 
observe that the ceiling of his cabin was 
splashed with racing gold—reflected sunlight 
from the water. What had seemed to him 
minutes had in reality been hours. He heard 
voices, but he could not see the speakers, be¬ 
cause something was wrong with his bunk! 

“A mighty narrow squeak.” Wardlaw rec¬ 
ognized this voice; it was the Doctor’s. “Did 
he carry any money?” 

“I don’t believe so.” This voice belonged 
to the Captain. “My ship, too! He said he 
was in danger, but he said he couldn’t tell 
where it was coming from. Some engineer¬ 
ing deal which the Japs are interested in 
blocking. I can’t put the w 7 hole steerage in 
irons. It was never one of my Lascars.” 
“What’s the row?” asked Wardlaw feebly. 
“He’s come around! No talking, matey!” 
said the Doctor, bending over. 

“What’s happened?” 

“Well, somebody took a sudden dislike to 
you last night, and gave you a love tap that 


78 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

would have sent you to Davy—but for one 
thing.” 

“One thing. What was that?” 

“It’ll keep. You stay in your bunk until 
to-morrow, just to be on the safe side. There’s 
a whale of a lump on the port side of your 
coco, and you couldn’t put a hat on if you 
wanted to.” 

“Maybe I dreamed it, but I thought I 
heard a woman’s voice call out. I don’t rec¬ 
ollect anything else.” Wardlaw discovered 
that by shifting his shoulders a trifle he could 
get his head at another angle. He saw two 
serious ruddy faces. “I’m all right—head¬ 
achy, but that’ll go away. I’ll be good and 
stick to the bunk if you’ll tell me what that 
one thing was.” 

“It’ll keep,” repeated the Doctor. “The 
steward will watch over you until noon, when 
I’ll come down again. Come along, Captain. 
What he needs is real sleep.” 

Wardlaw sensibly closed his eyes, for the 
glare hurt. So they had come at him boldly, 
and something had miraculously intervened? 
Sensing that there was now no possibility of 
getting the receipt—for whatever purpose 
they had in mind—the Japs had attacked him 
boldly and sinisterly; and but for a miracle 
John Wardlaw would at this moment be rest¬ 
ing in the gray muck of the bay. If he hadn’t 
been mooning! 

He dozed. By and by he heard voices, 
mere murmurs. 

“Anybody there?” he called. 

“I, sir,” answered the steward promptly. 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


79 

“Bolster me up so that I can lie on my side.” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“That’s better. Whom were you talking 
to?” 

“I was humming a tune, sir,” lied the stew¬ 
ard. 

“Ventriloquist—I see. I’m all right. Never 
mind trying to clean up.” 

“Doctor’s orders you’re not to talk, sir.” 

“Hang the Doctor’s orders! I’m no in¬ 
fant.” 

Once more Wardlaw dozed, and gradually 
went down into sound slumber. The con¬ 
sciousness of a pleasant intermittent coolness 
eventually aroused him. He glanced ceiling- 
ward. The glare was gone. From this he 
gathered that he had slept well into the after¬ 
noon. Then he directed his attention to the 
shadow which rose and fell beside him. 

Seated upon a camp-stool was Miss Allison, 
and in her hand was a palm-leaf. Her eyes 
were closed, as if a long vigil had wearied 
her. An almost irresistible desire seized him 
to reach out, catch the hand and kiss it. 
Queer, that he should have such a desire! 
How long had she been here? 

Now that he saw the face for the first time 
in repose, he observed what he thought to be 
the character which lay behind it. It was 
more than a beautiful face. Unanimated, all 
the salient features were open to analysis, and 
the strength of the ensemble overshadowed 
the mere beauty. He was no judge of 
women’s faces, but he was eminently a judge 
of men’s; and there were characteristics here 


8o CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS ' 

that spoke of masculine attributes. That little 
break in the nose—the bridge—meant reso¬ 
lution; the sweep of the handsome mouth, 
firmness; the turn of the jaw, courage. What 
a woman! 

He sighed. Her eyes opened quickly, and 
the fan dropped. 

“ Awake? Better?” 

“ just now. Do you know that you are very 
beautiful?” ' 

“Mercy, I thought you were a bashful 
man!” 

“I don’t know; I believe I’ve changed a 
lot.” 

“No doubt of it. For weeks you never 
noticed me.” 

“But I did!” 

“Is there anything you might care to tell 
me?” 

“Nothing.” 

“The Doctor said I might look in if I didn’t 
start you to talking.” 

“What the Doctor says doesn’t worry me.” 

She began waving the fan again. Suddenly 
he reached out and caught her by the fore¬ 
arm. She gasped. 

“What’s the matter?”—anxiously. 

“You surprised me.” 

“That wasn’t a cry of surprise; it was a 
gasp of pain.” 

“Nonsense! Would you like some tea?” 

“No; I want to talk.” 

She got up. “That’s against orders.” 

“I want to know what happened last night. 
Nobody’s told me yet.” 


t 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS Si 

A' , 

“To-morrow, when you’re out on deck 
again. Good-by!” 

“Just a minute! Please listen!” ' 

She paused. 

“Is there any way for me to get an ice¬ 
cream soda—chocolate preferred?” 

“In this part of the world?” 

“Yes. We get queer ideas, sometimes, we 
chaps who spend half our days in deserts and 
jungles. O’Holleran—one of my subordi¬ 
nates—is always moaning in his sleep for 
corned beef and cabbage. And I’m always 
wanting an ice-cream soda. I don’t see any¬ 
thing so funny in that.” . 

For she was laughing. “Some day I may 
tell you why I laugh. Good-by. I’ll have 
them send you some tea.” And she went 
out. 

The door opened a quarter of an hour 
later, and the steward presented a tray with 
tea and toast. 

“Take it away,” ordered Wardlaw grump- 

“But Miss Allison said you wanted some, 
sir ” 

“I did—but I don’t.” ^ 

Except for an occasional spell of light¬ 
headedness, Wardlaw was all right the next 
day. He wore his cap at a truculent angle—■ 
thereby keeping the inquisitive at bay and the 
lump in obscurity. But he kept to his chair 
most of the day. He was weak. She came 
and sat down beside him several times, but 
her visits were not of a sedative quality; she 
was up and away the moment he began to ask 


82 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


questions. Once, however, she remained as 
long as half an hour. This was during Hur- 
oki’s visit. 

The little yellow man expressed lively sym¬ 
pathy. “You have had an accident, they tell 
me.” 

“Nothing serious. Some harbor thief got 
aboard and tried to rob me. But all my val¬ 
uables are locked up, and my death wouldn’t 
benefit anybody.” 

Wardlaw smiled affably, and Huroki re¬ 
turned the smile. 

“I see,” said the latter, shrugging. “You 
should have gone ashore with the rest of 


“You don’t like him,” said Miss Allison 
when Huroki was gone. “Why do you play 
bridge with him so much?” 

“I like to watch him. The Japs are inter¬ 
esting people.” 

“You spoke of danger the other night.” 

“Wasn’t guesswork, was it?” 

“You were expecting something like this. 
What have you been doing?” 

“Who, I?” 

“Yes. Why should the Japanese try to kill 
you?” 

“How do you know it was a Jap?” he 
countered quickly. 

“The Captain’s Cingalese servant saw the 
affair.” 

“I heard a woman’s voice call out. Was it 
you? Did you come back?” 

“Why should I make a confidant of you?, 
You will not make one of me.” 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 83 

“What do you wish to know?” He looked 
into her eyes with disconcerting frankness. 

“You expected to be set upon. Why?” 

“Miss Allison, there is a great business 
project going on—” he began. 

Impulsively she put out her hand. “Wait! 
What prevented you from telling me the 
other night?” 

“The knowledge that I had no right to tell 
you,” he answered simply. 

“Then don’t tell me.” 

“You’re the oddest woman I ever met.” 

“Most women are odd. We always want 
to know.” 

“You wanted to see if my loyalty was worth 
anything; is that it? Thanks for catching me 
up. I’m not so strong as I thought I was.” 

“The fault is mine. I had no right to press 
such questions.” 

He looked at her sharply. He wasn’t sure, 
but there seemed to be an undertone of mock¬ 
ery. “I’ll tell you all about it when we get 
to Hong Kong—that is, if you’ll tell me why 
you laughed when I wanted a soda.” 

“Agreed. Do you know who Huroki is?” 

“A recent graduate from Yale—so he says.” 

“Well, if I were you, I wouldn’t play cards 
with him so much.” 

“Do you know what he is?” 

“What’s your idea?” 

“Why, he may be in the Japanese secret 
service.” 

“Then it’s world politics?” 

There was a pause. He was the first to 
break it. 



84 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

P 

“Has it ever occurred to you that we white 
men are mighty unpoetical when we name 
our women?” 

“Name our women?” she repeated vaguely. 

“Yes. We call our women Mary or Bess 
or Jane; and where’s the poetry in such 
names? To the American Indian, the Hindu, 
the Arab, and the yellow people—a name 
means something. The Indian calls his 
daughter Laughing-Waters; the Arab, the 
Wind-in-the-sky; the Jap, Lotus-Blossom. 
That’s poetry.” 

“My name is Jean—if that’s what you’re 
after.” 

“That has a pleasant sound. But what does 
it mean?” 

“Me,” she said; and they both laughed. 

One thing deeply puzzled him. She never 
spoke of home; never once, no matter how 
many clumsy traps he laid, did she lift the 
smallest end of the curtain. He was not or¬ 
dinarily curious; but his phase held a fasci¬ 
nation for him, and he was always maneuver¬ 
ing toward it. 

The night they left Singapore he dined 
again with the Captain; and it was just after 
he had lighted his cigar that he summoned his 
courage and asked the sailor point blank what 
he knew about Miss Allison. 

“Ripping young woman!” cried the Cap¬ 
tain with honest enthusiasm. “I’m begim 
ning to enjoy my dinners in the salon.” 

“Has she ever spoken of her family—her 
people?” 

“Not that I recall. She’s a mighty jolly 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 85 

young woman, and a proper one. Are you 
looking for a past, young man?” , 

“I feel like a cad!” exclaimed Wardlaw* 
“But she interests me as no other woman ever 
did; and I want to know all about her. I 
don’t stammer when I talk to her. I don’t 
bump into things as I used to. I’m not a 
woman-hater. I’ve just been plain naturally 
scared of them.” 

“A bashful man? And I always thought 
that one of them had ripped your plates under 
the boiler-room! So you want to know all 
about her?” There was a twinkle in the Cap¬ 
tain’s blue eyes. “That’s easily done.” 

“How?” 

“Well, you might marry her.” 

“Marry her?” gasped Wardlaw. 

“Yes. She’ll tell you everything—or noth¬ 
ing, which is just as likely.” 

“Marry her!” This time it was a kind of 
whisper, an echo of an astounding thought. 
“By George!” Wardlaw got up and went 
outside, leaving the Captain squinting at the 
starry night beyond the slightly swinging door. 

The South China Sea has a bag full of 
tricks. She is a most deceiving lady—beatific 
calms, typhoons. You may cross her twenty 
voyages and see nothing more active than a 
school of porpoise disturb her placid bosom. 
You may make another twenty and do noth¬ 
ing but dodge or plow through the loosed 
spirits of ten million whirling dervishes. 
Green mountains of water, green skies and 
black horizons, and a booming as muffled 
bells. 


' 


86 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

They ran into the outer circle of one of 
these terrors. All day it blew great guns and 
little guns. The forward hatch was literally 
torn away; a boat was stove in, and the rail on 
the starboard quarter smashed into a junk of 
twisted piping and splintered teak. 

There were few in the dining saloon that 
night. Miss Allison beckoned to Wardlaw 
to come over to her table, which he did read¬ 
ily. After dinner she suggested that they go 
outside. 

“Pretty rough weather,” he said doubt¬ 
fully. 

“I’m not afraid. I’m a good sailor.” 

“That isn’t it. You might get hurt.” 

“Come along!” 

“All right—to the last ditch.” 

She put on her heavy deck-coat, tied a veil 
over her hair, linked her arm in his and led 
him outside. This camaraderie was to Ward- 
law the most delightful experience he had 
ever known. 

The moon was up, but wan. The ship 
seemed to be plowing through mountains of 
molten silver and valleys of ink. By pulling 
themselves along the deck-house rail they suc¬ 
ceeded in getting well forward. Suddenly, 
in a spirit of mischief, she broke away from 
the rail and tried to stand alone. A dip sent 
her staggering toward the outer rail. But 
even as he sprang toward her a rise sent her 
into his arms. 

And—he kissed her! 




CHAPTER X 


'T'HIS kiss was squarely on the lips—no 
clumsy cheek caress. The cave-man! But 
instantly he knew that he hadn’t played the 
cave-man cynically. He had kissed her be¬ 
cause he had to. An abominable act! His 
conscience was already at war with his senses. 
He had grossly insulted her. He would 
never forgive himself. He was stunned with 
the appalling thought that this would mark 
the end of things. 

She was first to recover from the shock. 
Quietly she put her palms against his chest 
and pressed him back, for he hadn’t thought 
to let her go! Then she caught at the hand¬ 
rail and drew herself around into the lee of 
the ladies’ salon, into which she vanished. 

He turned and staggered toward the beacon 
of light that streamed out of the smoke room 
door. He curled himself up in a lounge 
corner and smoked. It hadn’t been premedi¬ 
tated; but this lack did not make it a whit 
less excusable. She would interpret the act 
logically as his real attitude toward her, the 
attitude of a cad. Yet he could not ignore 
the exultation which still tingled his blood. 

He had kissed her, with her hair, sweet¬ 
smelling blowing into his face, her heart 
echoing the thunder of his own. No matter 

87 


88 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


what happened, he would always have this 
moment. 

He raised his head suddenly. A perfume, 
subtle, elusive: what had it been? Lemon- 
verbena! That was it. It was her kitbag 
that had gotten into his cabin by mistake. 
Lemon-verbena! 

But why had he kissed her? What was be- 
. hind this inexplicable act? He lowered his 
pipe, his mouth agap. He loved her! 

He went outside again. The smoke room 
had become insupportably stuffy. He wanted 
the singing wind in his hair; he wanted to 
watch the mobile hills and valleys, the rock¬ 
ing moon; he wanted to get close to the ele¬ 
mental. He loved her! 

All the baffling puzzles solved. Why, he 
must have fallen in love with her back there 
that day at the theatre. “Marry,” the Cap¬ 
tain had said. And so he would—if she 
would have him—if she could forgive him! 
“Play the cave-man,” the professor had said. 
jWell, he had played it; and if he hadn’t played 
it, he would never have known that he loved 
her—before it was too late and she had passed 
over the horizon. So it had come. He, John 
Wardlaw, old-stick-in-the-mud, had found 
him a desirable woman. 

It was midnight before he turned in; but 
he couldn’t sleep. 

Neither could she. She heard his door 
slam, and she sat up in her bunk and stared in 
the direction of that sound. Why she sud¬ 
denly burst into tears and buried her face in 
the pillow is a mystery not to be solved. 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 89 

Wardlaw was up early the next morning. 
This would be their last day together—or the 
first of many. He was filled with a great 
courage. He ate his breakfast hurriedly and 
went on deck in search of her. He found her 
at the starboard rail, chatting amiably with 
Huroki; and Wardlaw’s fine resolves went by 
the board. Nevertheless he approached. 
She had seen him, and if he ran away now, he 
was lost. 

Huroki did not leave. He greeted Ward- 
law with a smile that displayed his sound 
white teeth. He spoke of the storm, recounted 
a previous experience, regretted that Japan 
would be cold until May. Perhaps he ob¬ 
served the gloomy abstraction in Wardlaw’s 
eyes. 

“Mr. Wardlaw, America is a great coun¬ 
try, and you Americans are supremely clever. 
Perhaps we shall meet again some day. Good 
morning.” And with a choppy little stride, 
Huroki walked away. 

“What did he mean by that?” asked Ward- 
law, puzzled. 

“We have just discovered that we belong 
to the Mutual Admiration Society. I have 
found out from him that he really admires 
our Yankee ingenuity, and he has learned from 
me that Americans have a wholesome respect 
for the Japanese. Good morning!” She 
opened a hand, and a thousand little pieces of 
paper fluttered on the wind. 

“You are not going?” 

“I am simply greeting you. Hadn’t the 
opportunity before.” 


go 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


He mumbled something unintelligible. 

“Hong Kong to-morrow,” she said, “and 
winter. I feel a touch of it in the air.” She 
drew her collar closer about her throat. 

Wardlaw had expected reproaches. He 
stared at her dumbly. 

“What a wonderful journey it has been!” 
she exclaimed, turning her eyes away. The 
utter bewilderment on the man’s face! An¬ 
other man would have instantly recognized 
her attitude, her willingness to overlook a mis¬ 
step. Apology was written so plainly in his 
face that she did not require any verbal ex¬ 
pression. “Have you packed?” 

“Packed?” 

“Yes. I’m going to pack this morning. I 
hate bundling things into my trunks the last 
moment. Come and see me at tea-time.” 
She waved her hand airily, and was gone. 

Sulkily he went into the ship’s library. He 
tried a dozen novels, and none of them held 
him after the first page or two. Anyhow, her 
manner suggested that she was willing to over¬ 
look the affront, provided, of course, that he 
never repeated it or spoke of it. 

Later he made two or three desperate sallies, 
but she had company, more than he had ever 
seen about her before. He kept his promise 
to join her at tea. But all the chairs were 
filled, and he had to stand, first on one leg and 
then on the other, like a pelican or an adjutant 
bird. Finally he set his cup on deck, excused 
himself and marched off in a huff which was 
visible to everybody. 

But he did find her alone after dinner—on 


9i 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

the boat deck, in the same little projection 
where he had received that crock on the head. 

“I don’t suppose you’ll ever forgive me,” 
he said abruptly, by way of greeting. 

“For what?” 

He saw the trap; but he stepped boldly into 
it. “I sha’n’t apologize.” 

“Well?” 

“I’m not sorry in the least.” 

“Why should you be? The wildness of the 
storm, the singing of the wind, the mountains 
rising and falling everywhere. Perhaps we 
were both a little mad. So a kiss, under such 
circumstances, is harmless.” 

“No,”—doggedly—“ it wasn’t harmless. 
Will you marry me?” 

She gave a little gasp. Then she de¬ 
manded : “Are you offering me marriage be¬ 
cause your conscience troubles you?” 

“No. Because I love you.” 

She had nothing to say for a moment. “So 
you wish to marry me?” 

“Yes.” ^ # ' 

“Knowing nothing about me whatever?” 

“I know all I want to know—that you’re 
the only woman I ever wanted.” 

“Captain Wardlaw, that is finely said. I 
appreciate the honor you do me.” 

“Yes—or no?” 

“Neither one nor the other. I shall be in 
Hong Kong for several days. If, when we 
meet again, you are willing to repeat what 
you have just told me, I promise you an an¬ 
swer.” And with this perplexing statement 
she turned and walked swiftly away, and ^as 


92 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

gone before he realized that she had not given 
him any address. 

The ship dropped anchor in the bay of 
Hong Kong at dawn; but Wardlaw did not 
turn out until seven. He had all the time in 
the world now. He had won out. 

As he stepped out of his cabin, he saw the 
door of hers wide open—and the cabin empty. 

“Where is Miss Allison?” he asked of the 
steward. 

“She went ashore about dawn, sir. A 
private launch came out for her.” 

This struck Wardlaw as rather odd. “Did 
she leave any note for me?” 

“No, sir—that is, not with me.” 

Wardlaw proceeded to the upper deck. 
Gone, and without a word! He became filled 
with a sense of foreboding. His cogitations 
were brought to a close by a vigorous thwack 
on the shoulders. He whirled about. 

“O’Holleran!” he cried. 

“Red hair and all! Gee, boss, but it’s good 
to see you. Come on! Chedsoye is below in 
the Company launch. Don’t bother about 
breakfast. We’ll have that at the club. All 
aboard!” 

“Where’s the old boy?” 

“Having his bacon and eggs on the Peak. 
Hustle!” 

“Give me a quarter of an hour.” 

“But hustle! Where’s your stuff?” 

Wardlaw gave his brisk lieutenant direc¬ 
tions and hurried off to the purser’s office. 
After all, why should he let a woman bother 
him? He was back in the game again, and 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


93 


that was all that really mattered. Carring¬ 
ton, Huroki & Company had gone into bank¬ 
ruptcy. Ainslee would probably dance the 
can-can when he was told what was in the 
portfolio. 

“Well, the voyage is over,” Wardlaw said 
cheerfully to the purser. “I’ll take that little 
portfolio of mine, if you please. The Cap¬ 
tain has the receipt in his safe.” 

“All right, Mr. Wardlaw.” The purser 
stooped before his safe, laid the portfolio on 
the counter and opened his signature-book. 

Wardlaw signed it and opened the portfolio. 
He drew forth a print and spread it out. 
Frantically he pulled out another and another. 
But none of these concerned the Oriental 
Construction Company. Wardlaw sat down 
weakly. 

“What’s the matter, Mr. Wardlaw?” asked 
the purser anxiously. 

“The matter is, I’ve been robbed in a most 
singular fashion.” 

“Robbed?” 

“Yes. But don’t worry. No fault of 
yours. These are the things I deposited with 
you, but they are not what I believed I was 
depositing.” 

“I say, Mr. Wardlaw, but I thought it 
bally odd at the time.” 

“What was?”—dully. 

“Why, Miss Allison deposited a portfolio 
exactly like yours, and she claimed it a little 
after five this morning.” 


CHAPTER XI 


ARDLAW was quite calm now, out- 



^ wardly. He refolded the worthless 
prints and restored them to the portfolio, so 
like his own that only the closest scrutiny 
might note the difference. He could only ap¬ 
preciate the diabolical cleverness of this amaz¬ 
ing substitution. The little incidents that led 
up to the theft would return to him later, in 
their chronological order. But just now there 
was only one thought: he had been betrayed 
by the woman he loved. 1 

“A bad blow, sir?” asked the purser; for 
Wardlaw’s face looked strangely gray and old. 

“Pm afraid it is. There’s no repairing it.” 

“Well, I thought I knew something about 
women!” 

“What do you mean by that?”—in a de¬ 
tached kind of way. 

“Why, she looked straight. Politics?” 

“World-politics.” 

“Ah, that’s different. Very clever women 
get into that game, and they’re not all as black 
as they’re painted.” 

“No doubt.” Lemon-verbena, and the mad 
wind blowing her hair into his face. 

“Anything I can do?” 

“Nothing. By the way, has that Jap Hur- 
oki left the ship?” 


94 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 95 

“He went ashore with Miss Allison.” 

“Thanks!” Nerves began to awake, now 
here, now there. Muscular knots formed at 
the base of Wardlaw’s jaw, and his eyes be¬ 
came as hard as Arctic ice. “You will say 
nothing of this.” 

“Trust me, Mr. Wardlaw.” 

“Good morning.” 

The first clear idea was to seek the Captain. 
The old sailor might be able to offer some 
side-lights. But the Captain was nonplussed 
at the news. 

“You can’t be talking of our Miss Allison?” 

“No one else.” 

“There’s a mistake somewhere.” 

“It was on my part,” replied Wardlaw 
grimly. 

“Then why did she save your life?” 

“Save my life?” 

“That she did! If she hadn’t called out, 
interposed her arm, we’d have had to ship 
you home from Colombo. My, Cingalese 
servant saw the whole affair, for I set him 
guard over you. The wonder is that her arm 
wasn’t broken.” 

“Her arm?” Wardlaw now recalled her 
gasp of pain when he caught her by the arm 
that morning after the assault. “I don’t know 
what to think or what to do,” he said despair¬ 
ingly. “The purser declares on his oath she 
deposited a portfolio like mine: and it was 
mine. She might be a tender nurse and a 
thief at the same time. Not an ordinary thief, 
Captain. A big international business intri¬ 
gue, and I’ve proved that I’m the most worth- 


96 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

less pawn on the board. It’s hard. I’ve 
worked so faithfully and loyally over the deal. 
I did everything I possibly could, but they 
were too clever. Captain, I’m done for, 
broken for good. The biggest thing in my 
career gone to pot. The finest old man in the 
world depending upon me and I’ve failed 
him. I took every precaution a human being 
could. But they beat me.” 

“But Miss Allison! What are you going 
to do?” 

“Walk into my office and hand in my resig¬ 
nation. Oh, I’ll always find work; but I’ll 
never again be trusted with big things. I’m 
done for. It isn’t the money. I’ve plenty. 
But the biggest thing in the world has slipped 
through my fingers—the two biggest things,” 
he added in afterthought. “Good-by, Cap¬ 
tain.” 

They shook hands; the sailor’s gaze fol¬ 
lowed Wardlaw until the latter’s head disap¬ 
peared below the deck. Intermittently, for 
some time after, the Captain wagged his 
head. 

“Look alive, boss,” called O’Holleran from 
the launch. “We’ve got your duds. No 
trunks?” 

“Nothing but the kitbags.” Wardlaw went 
down the ladder and took his seat in the 
launch. “How’s the old boy?” 

“Chipper. He won’t be able to see you 
until to-night. He left word for you to go up 
the Peak and dine with him.” 

“Did the bankers arrive?” 

“Three hundred million dollars’ of ’em! 



CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 


97 

Open her up, boy!” O’Holleran called to the 
Chinese mechanic. 

“Hello, Ched! Got rid of that ague, I 
see.” 

“Well, I don’t shake as much as I did. Have 
a pleasant trip, boss?” 

“Fine!” 

There was no use dragging these fine fel¬ 
lows in; he alone was culpable; so he decided 
to say nothing to them. Idly he watched the 
flag maneuvers of the gray battleships over 
Kowloon way. Everything was ready, and 
the secret in the hands of the Japanese Gov¬ 
ernment! The confidence he had had in the 
mere sight of that portfolio! Poor fool, why 
hadn’t he opened it then, while the odd sub¬ 
stitution of the kitbags was still fresh in his 
mind? 

He reached into his vest pocket for a match. 
With the match he fetched two bits of paper. 
“Car — China” Carrington! Not being sure 
of the Japs, he had sent along the woman. 
How easy it was to translate the meaning of 
her friendliness! 

Still, why should he blame her? If she 
had betrayed him, it was during an hour when 
they were totally unknown to each other, ex¬ 
cept by sight. The galling idea was that per¬ 
haps she had been smiling in her sleeve all the 
while. The woman he loved, and would go 
on loving until the end of his days. 

In the pay of Carrington—that is to say, a 
secret agent for the General Construction 
Company. He had read of beautiful women 
doing this sort of work, but he had always at- 




98 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

tributed it to the imaginative flights of novels 
ists. No doubt she had turned over the prints 
and estimates to Huroki—for a fat price. 
Anyhow, they had left the ship together. 
Never again would he scent the perfume of 
lemon-verbena without distaste. 

A woman-hater! It now appeared on the 
face of the waters that he was due to become 
one in all earnest. 

“What’s the matter, boss?” asked O’Hol-* 
leran. 

“Why?” 

“You look a bit peaked.” 

“Breakfast will jack me up.” 

“How’d you leave that little ol’ New 
York?” 

“Too suddenly to please me. But how’s the 
old boy’s health?” 

“You can never tell by his looks. But I 
guess the trip did him a lot of good. Never, 
saw such a busy rooster. He’s been up to 
Peking and back four times. And I’ll wager 
there isn’t a doorknob in the palace he hasn’t 
rattled. All ready for you, boss.” 

All ready for him! Wardlaw swallowed 
with difficulty and stared at the hotel on the 
Peak. In a few hours he would be up there, 
telling of his supreme failure. He mapped 
out exactly what he should do: a frank con¬ 
fession that the little yellow men had beaten 
him. On no account would he mention the 
woman. 

He struck that day from his calendar. He 
never could recollect what he did from the 
hour of landing until seven o’clock that night, 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 99 

when he entered the lobby of the hotel where 
Ainslee put up whenever he was in Hong 
Kong. The Chinese servant who led Ward- 
law up to Ainslee’s suite remarked that Mr. 
Ainslee was sending off some cables and 
would be with him presently. 

In the centre of the living room was a table 
set with shining silver and spotless linen. 
The fatted calf for the prodigal. Wardlaw 
shrugged and walked at once to one of the 
windows and stood there staring down at the 
sparkling harbor. 

Where was she? Of what was she think¬ 
ing at this moment? Would he ever see her 
again? A kiss and a whiff of lemon-verbena! 
How well he knew John Wardlaw! Had she 
appeared before him at this moment, he 
would have fallen at her feet, forgiven her 
everything, followed her, married her. 

I He heard the door open and close, and he 
turned. His heart did not seem to have as 
much room as usual. 

“Hello, son!” hailed Henry Ainslee, com¬ 
ing forward with outstretched hands, his 
tanned and ruddy face expanded in the 
friendliest smile imaginable. 

Wardlaw pressed the hands powerfully, 
stirred as he was by the thought of all this man 
had done for him. 

“Mr. Ainslee, perhaps I’ve no right to shake 
your hands. I’ve failed.” 

“Failed? Here, sit down on the lounge. 
Have a cigar? No? What do you mean by 
failed?” . . | 

“Your warning, which I received in Cairo, 


100 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


was obeyed. I took every precaution. But 
I’m only a civil engineer; I’m not clever 
enough for this sort of game. The little yel¬ 
low men got the best of me. By this time the 
Japanese Government knows everything.” 

“Tell me exactly what happened. I put 
the game in your hands, son. Give me all 
the facts.” 

Briefly Wardlaw recounted his adventure 
—with one exception. 

“Lord, Lord! Why didn’t you let me know 
what you had done? Why didn't you cable 
me that you had drawn up rough estimates 
and specifications? What a mistake! Why 
didn’t O’Holleran tip me?” 

“I had made him promise; I had made 
them all promise. I was so afraid that some¬ 
thing would get out.” 

“But to me!” 

“I wanted to surprise you.” 

“I guess you’ve done it.” 

“I had no inkling of what was going on in 
New York. Perhaps you should have been 
a little more explicit. But you were ill, they 
said, and I made allowances. And yet ordi¬ 
narily I should have pulled through all 
right. I was betrayed in a most remarkable 
manner.” 

“Betrayed?” Ainslee twisted his unlighted 
cigar from one corner of his mouth to the 
other. 

“Some one beside yourself knew about that 
portfolio. Even had one of my kitbags imi¬ 
tated so cleverly that it completely fooled me. 
The substitution was made before we left 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS iox 


Port Said; and from there to Hong Kong I 
lived in blissful ignorance. I made so many 
mistakes! Could they have approached your 
private secretary?” 

“As easily as they could O’HolIeran or 
yourself. No; the leak couldn’t have been 
there. Too bad, too bad! Well, we’ll take 
our medicine. You’re the best boy I’ve ever 
known. Nobody’s infallible.” 

“Carrington was back of it. Not having a 
true angle of the game that was being played 
in New York, he laid a trap for me and I 
walked straight into it. He asked me how 
long it would take to build the road, and like 
a fool I said five years. Carrington’s an en¬ 
gineer, and a good one. He knew what that 
meant, and laid his mines accordingly. Five 
years! I might just as well have told him 
that we had drawn up specifications and esti¬ 
mates as we went along. And I gave it away.” 

“So I was informed.” 

“I’ll resign.” 

“Better hang on a little while longer.” 
Ainslee’s chin sank into his collar. “The old 
plate! Well, it’s all in the game. Your 
loyalty, son, is worth something to me per¬ 
sonally. I acquit you of any blame. It’s the 
way the cards fell. You happen to be an 
honest man, and when you fight a crook, you 
have to use crooked methods.” 

“Mr. Ainslee, I admire you more than any 
man I know. I am grateful for all you have 
done for me; but I rather believe that this is 
the end of my usefulness.” 

“Anything else to confess?” 


102 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


“Nothing.” 

Ainslee took from his pocket a folded slip 
of paper. He carefully spread it out on a 
knee. 

“How old was Cupid? How did that 
strike you, son?” 

“Until I looked into the code addendum, I 
thought it was some joke.” 

“Clarke thought it was a joke when I asked 
him.” Ainslee chuckled. “Didn’t he tell 
you I was showing signs of senile decay? Son, 
instinctively I knew that the moment I left 
New York, they’d let out something to the 
Japs. A mere hint would be sufficient; for 
the Japanese Government isn’t in love with 
Captain John Wardlaw, late of the En¬ 
gineers. 

Ainslee got up and began to walk about, 
waving the paper to emphasize his remarks. 
He was a big man, robust and a trifle florid. 
He looked healthy, but his heart was in sore 
straits. Each time he took a sharp breath 
came a blinding stab; and sooner or later, 
that stab would go a little too deep, and then 
—good-by! So he put his house in order, as 
you will see. 

Occasionally he sent an oblique glance at 
the depressed countenance of his trusted lieu¬ 
tenant. A three-cornered fight, with one foot 
ostensibly in the grave! The plate, this boy 
here and—he stopped before Wardlaw and 
smiled down at him. 

“Son, I was ill; but just now I feel I’m 
going to get well. Doubtless you believe I 
ought to have been more explicit in my first 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 103 

cable to you. I knew exactly what I was 
doing. They haven’t dubbed me Old Details 
for nothing. I was in pretty bad shape when 
I left New York, but not so bad that I 
couldn’t outthink and outwit a precious pair 
like Clarke and Carrington. I let them be¬ 
lieve I had both feet in the grave. That was 
my trap. They did not fall into it; they 
jumped in. For weeks I’ve had a private de¬ 
tective trailing that pair. Here, read this 
cable which I just sent Clarke.” 

The change of tone was enough to send 
Wardlaw’s thoughts whirling. Since dawn 
he had been knocked about, mentally. What 
kind of a blow was coming now? Ainslee’s 
tone was ironical, but it was buoyant. Ward- 
law read: “N ever kick a dog because he looks 
dead; he may be only sleeping ” He turned 
a bewildered countenance upon his benefactor. 
“Is that in the code?” 

“Son, it’s the purest and simplest English 
I could think of.” 

Suddenly Ainslee seized his lieutenant by 
the shoulders and shook him boisterously. 

“How old was Cupid? He was any old 
age—mine, if you like. Come, wake up; no 
need to look at me like that. Never was 
sounder in the head than at this moment.” 

“But-” 

“But me no buts! You were never going 
to peep, were you? You were going to turn 
that page down like a sportsman and say noth¬ 
ing to anyone. Big enough to take your 
medicine without blinking! 

“I am getting along; my day is over. When 



104 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

this road is finished, you’ll come to New York 
and wabble around in my official shoes. This 
is my last fight. From now on I’m going to 
play. I’ve made you my heir, to carry the 
plate on. And you’ll carry it. You’ve been 
the victim of circumstances—circumstances 
more or less cooked up. Clarke and Carring¬ 
ton will jump to the General Construction 
after next election. You’ll make a good am¬ 
bassador—with a good coach at your elbow.” 

Clarke was right: the old boy was as mad 
as a hatter. Heir? When the road was fin¬ 
ished? Ambassador? What a pity, what a 
pity! And O’Holleran had said never a 
word. 

“All right, Mr. Ainslee; anything you say,” 
he said in a mildly conciliatory tone. 

Ainslee exploded. “By the Lord Harry, 
the boy really believes I’m daffy! Listen to 
Old Details, son. You’ve worked under my 
banner for fifteen solid years. I look upon 
you with the same faith I look upon my 
watch, which is a good one. If you said a 
deal could be done in such and such a time, 
you were always correct. You said it would 
take a year to go from the Tsaidam Swamps 
to Shanghai. You always made allowances 
for obstacles in your computations. You 
were gone on this trip fourteen months. 
Knowing you, these two extra months set me 
thinking. You were always doing the unex¬ 
pected. So when you started for New York, 
I wired O’Holleran for facts. I gave him 
my reasons for wanting them, and he let your 
cat out of the bag. Perhaps I didn’t crowd 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 105 

on steam after that glorious news! I kept the 
wireless going until the batteries gave out. 
But I had a great idea in regard to you, son; 
so I couldn’t take you into my confidence. I 
had to warn you, but I could do no more than 
that. How old was Cupid? I had to leave 
you to your own devices. Well, between Port 
Said and Colombo I received a wireless giv¬ 
ing me that estimate of yours.” 

“What?” Wardlaw’s gloomy eyes became 
filled with fire. 

“Yes, sir. A week ago Norton and his 
banker friends put their lordly fists under 
mine, and three days ago the Chinese Gov¬ 
ernment-” 

“You’ve pulled it through?” Wardlaw 
began to feel a bit light-headed. 

“On your rough estimate and the word of 
Henry Ainslee.” 

“But how did you get that estimate?” de¬ 
manded Wardlaw. thrilling. 

“By wireless.” 

“No, no! Who sent it?” 

“I’ll spin a yarn.” 

“I don’t want to hear any yarn. I want to 
know who sent that estimate.” 

“I’m going to tell this yarn; and if you in¬ 
terrupt me, I’ll fire you!” 

“Very well,” agreed Wardlaw. He was 
half convinced that he was in the middle of 
some fantastic dream. Ainslee’s heir? The 
deal gone through? Carrington beaten? He 
clasped his hands and bore down until the 
knuckles cracked. He wanted to feel a hurt 
to assure himself that he was really awake. 



io6 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

Ainslee cleared his voice. “I’m a lonely 
old codger. Wife and boy died thirty years 
ago. I’m as lonely in my way as you are in 
yours, Jack.” 

Jack! How good that sounded, coming 
from the lips of the old boy. 

“I’ve had my eye on you for years. Maybe 
you weren’t aware of it, but I’ve been keeping 
the closest kind of tabs on you. If I had a 
son, I’d want him built like you, mentally and 
physically. You used to puzzle me. You 
were such a shy, incurious duffer. Never 
bothered about New York; never fished for 
information; took care of your end and let 
it go at that. So finally I came to the con¬ 
clusion that it was your work. You loved the 
job as another man might have loved a 
woman. You always picked out something 
nobody thought could be done—and you got 
away with it. I used to laugh. If a woman 
turned the corner, you ran like a white-head; 
if it was a tiger, Lordy, what a scrap! 

“On the other hand, I began to grow afraid 
that the wrong woman might land you in the 
end. To paraphrase an old saying of my 
friend Fitzsimmons, the bashfuller they are, 
the harder they fall. More of that later. 
You had the supreme faculty of making your 
subordinates love you. You can get more 
through a man’s heart than through his brain. 
You think I won this fight. No. You won 
it because you had an idea. I only made use 
of it.” Ainslee’s hands went down and closed 
over Wardlaw’s smarting fingers. He raised 
the young man to his feet. “Son you thought 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 107 

this was a business stunt. On the contrary, it 
was, if you dig down deep enough, only an old 
man in search of a son. Will you be mine?” 

“Why, God bless you, Mr. Ainslee, for 
that!” Wardlaw choked. “I don’t want to be 
your heir; but if you’ll put your hand on my 
shoulder once in a while and call me Jack, 
I’ll be satisfied.” 

“The whole shooting-match goes along with 
me. I’m a romantic old coot, if you want to 
know. The drawer under my bunk on the 
yacht is filled with soft-soapy yarns; but I 
like ’em. One day I wrote a story in my head. 
It appealed to me so strongly that I had to 
dramatize it. How old was Cupid? Don’t 
interrupt me. I had an idea in regard to you. 
I had another in regard to someone else. And 
neither of you realized that I was dramatiz¬ 
ing you. I tested you in every possible way, 
and always you emerged—clean. Well, 
things turned out as I planned. You were 
betrayed, but you were going down into ob¬ 
livion without a whimper. I like that. Son, 
I betrayed you. Scarcely a day went by that 
I did not get a wireless.” 

“Will you tell me who sent you that esti¬ 
mate?” 

“A woman. And there she is now!” 

There came a metallic rattle of curtain 
rings, and Wardlaw’s glance shot in the direc¬ 
tion of the sound. In the doorway, between 
the portieres which led to the adjoining room, 
stood a woman in black, her face and arms 
and shoulders as luminously pale as moon¬ 
shine. 


CHAPTER XII 


T HERE are moments—flashes of happiness 
—which we always cherish, even to the 
smallest details. We store them away in the 
back of our heads, and only half-lights and 
singleness bring them forth again. Such a 
moment was this tableau to Wardlaw. So 
long as he lived he would see her there, framed 
in the portieres, the incline of her body like 
that of the winged victory in the Louvre. 
“Hello, Junior!” cried Ainslee. 

“Hello, Uncle Henry!” 

She let the* portieres fall behind her and 
came toward the two men without embarrass¬ 
ment. 

“Jack, this is Cameron Junior, my ward,” 
said Ainslee, “daughter of my old partner, 
Dick Cameron.” 

Typhoons and kitbags and lemon-verbena! 
Wardlaw was incapable of stirring so much 
as a finger. Perhaps she misinterpreted his 
attitude, for the smile faded, and another 
woman would have noted anxiety in her eyes. 

“I am pleased to meet Captain Wardlaw 
—again,” she said, slowly extending her hand. 
“Uncle, I believe he doesn’t intend to shake 
hands with me! Isn’t he going to forgive 
me?” 

“I’ll leave that for you two to find out,” 

108 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 109 

said Ainslee. “I’ll be back in twenty min¬ 
utes—and Samson pulled down the Temple in 
two.” 

Ainslee went out and closed the door be¬ 
hind him. He did not stop, but continued on 
down to the main dining room. He was hun¬ 
gry. Having an anticipatory mind, he knew 
that he must eat his dinner now or never. 

The first movement Wardlaw made, after 
the door closed, was to draw his hands across 
his bewildered eyes. 

“I’m really and truly,” she said with a pro¬ 
vocative smile. But she did not renew the 
offer of her hand—an ominous sign, had he 
but known. 

“Cameron. I never knew he had a 
daughter.” Instantly he knew that he had 
said something of incomparable brilliancy, 
something to be placed in the category of 
Balaam’s historical address. 

“No doubt. I’ve been Uncle Henry’s ward 
since I was fifteen—nine years, in fact.” 

“You don’t need a guardian.” 

“Ah, that’s better. We’ll manage this in¬ 
terview after all. Sorry you won’t shake 
hands.” She floated past him to the window. 
“China—and over there, the road!” 

The road! That stirred Wardlaw’s mental 
machinery, even if ponderously. The road! 
It meant something to her also. The sweep 
of her glorious shoulders and the poise of her 
magnificent head! The road! It was like a 
bell to a sleeper: Wardlaw was beginning to 
wake up. 

“My mother’s name was Allison. I took, 



IIO CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

that. All my life I wanted to get into the 
game—feel the stir of big adventure where 
men risk their lives for an idea. It was in my 
blood. But I was a woman. My heart was 
big enough, but my petticoats were in the way. 
I’ve been after Uncle Henry for years, but 
he has always put me off with excuses, 
wanted to be of some use in the world; I 
wanted to do things. I was like a feather in 
the wind; I drifted or flew, but never with 
any objective. Think of his having time to 
dramatize us, and still achieve a great end! 
Think of the heart of a man who, desperately 
pressed in a stupendous business intrigue, 
could find the time to try to make two people 
happy! We started out bravely, you and I, 
upon a great adventure—in the end to learn 
that we were puppets on a wire. Think of 
his finding time to dramatize us! How well 
he knew us both! We thought it was really 
and truly, anyhow. A souvenir for my old 
age. You amused me. You were as shy as 
a trout I once knew. If I hadn’t been acci¬ 
dentally locked in your cabin that day, I doubt 
we’d ever become acquainted.” 

To Wardlaw the room seemed to have 
grown unaccountably chill. 

“My mother died shortly after my birth. 
This, along with the fact that I was a girl, 
nearly broke my father’s heart. He had so 
wanted a boy! When I was five he began to 
make a boy of me. He took me along with 
him into the wildernesses. I lived in tents 
and shacks. I grew up hard and sound and 
a little wild. But he did not neglect my edu- 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS hi 


cation. He was not only a great engineer; 
he was also a brilliant scholar. He was so 
vital physically that the world never consid¬ 
ered him anything but a human dynamo. 
When he died, I knew a great deal about na¬ 
ture and some facts about men. 

“I was fifteen then. Naturally I fell under 
Uncle Henry’s care. He saw to it that I 
should receive the advantages due to my sex. 
But the spirit of adventure was so strong in 
me that education and city life never suc¬ 
ceeded in repressing it. After I was eighteen 
I began to travel. I went everywhere, out of 
the beaten tracks. I rode, hunted, swam, 
climbed; I made a pilgrimage to all the great 
engineering feats of the O. C. C. And I 
heard of you.” 

It was the way she said that that made the 
room a little warmer. 

“I heard of you; but somehow I was never 
able to catch up with you. Your exploits fas¬ 
cinated me, and I made a hero out of you, as 
young girls will sometimes. How I longed 
to get into the game—something big, vital, ex¬ 
citing! I hate scissors, needles, spools. But 
I can cook. I had to. Out in the open I had 
to cook for Father—dear old Daddy! Uncle 
Henry found me a fine little rebel. But he 
had been dealing all his life with rebels. He 
has made a fine art of persuasion. I soon dis¬ 
covered that I liked being tamed—by a proper 
man. But for a long time I was hobblede¬ 
hoy. 

“Imagine my joy when Uncle Henry called 
me up one night and told me what he wanted 


112 


CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


me to do! I felt like a crusader before the 
walls of Jerusalem. I was going to add my 
mite to the splendid monument my father had 
left behind. I now realize why Uncle Henry 
is a tower in the business world. He antici¬ 
pates everything, leaves nothing to chance. 
He did not know that you had drawn up spec¬ 
ifications and estimates; he only prepared 
against that possibility. He did not know 
that Carrington would betray us to the Jap¬ 
anese; he only armed himself against the pos¬ 
sibility. You had given him duplicate keys 
to your kitbags; his portfolio and yours were 
exactly alike; he even got me the label I put 
on your kitbags. 

“All this a month before you came to New 
York. But you—and O’Holleran and Ched- 
soye and Jones! It was magnificent. Just 
you four, to accomplish what you did! Im¬ 
agine the fervor, the zeal, with which I en¬ 
tered the game—to learn this afternoon that 
I was acting in a play especially written for 
me! And all the time I believed that the 
future of O. C. C. depended solely upon my 
woman’s cleverness. While his idea was 
merely to throw us together, in stress and 
danger. There was danger, real danger; and 
for that part I thank him.” 

Her voice was like a harp, lightly touched; 
but there was an undertone which filled him 
with vague prescience that the future wasn’t 
so clear as might be. He determined not to 
speak until she was done. Puppets! 

“He was always worrying over me, like a 
hen over a duckling. The streak of wildness 


CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 113 

and impulsiveness is still strong in me; and he 
knows it. He was always in fear that I might 
marry the wrong man. But of that, more 
anon. He told me about the secret bottoms 
in your kitbags. My part was to get your 
portfolio—before the Japs. All the way 
across the Atlantic, from Naples to Brindisi, 
from Constantinople to Alexandria, I studied 
your kitbags—the one you always carried. I 
was reasonably assured that if you had any 
valuables, they would be in that kitbag. 
Label by label I imitated it. It was ex¬ 
tremely difficult, but it was also exciting. Oh, 
I was clever enough. Even if I was only 
acting a part, I had to interpolate lines, as 
they say. And I never enjoyed anything half 
so much. When the steward set down your 
kitbags before your cabin door, I personally 
made the substitution. It took but a minute 
to change the portfolios. And then I waited 
—in terror. Supposing you looked into the 
portfolio, which nine men out of ten would 
have done? Supposing you discovered the 
trick at once?” 

“I was thinking of you,” he said quietly. 
“That’s the reason.” 

A pause. What was she looking at—the 
harbor lights? As a matter of fact, she was 
closely watching his slightest move—his re¬ 
flection in the window-glass. 

“Yesterday morning when you came upon 
Huroki and me, I had just finished telling 
him that the Chinese Government had signed 
the concession. The first night I saw you 
playing bridge with him, I wired Uncle 




11 4 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 

Henry his description; and your friend 
O’Holleran supplied the information that he 
was a secret agent. He thought you knew, 
and that we were in secret partnership. I 
offered him transportation ashore this morn¬ 
ing, just to confuse you. Well, I played a 
part in a man’s game, even if Uncle Henry 
wrote the part for me out of the kindness of 
his heart. The O. C. C. will go on, and my 
father’s name will go on with it. So many 
times I wanted to tell you, everything—after 
I had sent the estimates. But the desire in me 
was strong to see how you would act in the 
end—when you learned that I had betrayed 
you. You never told him. That pleased me 
quite as much as it pleased him. He was al¬ 
ways talking about you, always praising you. 
And now—we must spoil his dream!” 

The final phrase went by; he missed its im¬ 
port. He was thinking that here was Sche¬ 
herazade in the flesh. He saw her nestled 
among her blue Cashmir pillows. The veil 
fluttered slightly as she talked. Through the 
marble lattice, so tenderly and beautifully 
carved, he could in fancy see the dazzling 
dusty landscape of India. Just beyond the 
lattice, on the broad ledge, gay green little 
parrakeets quarreled and made love, and 
where the minaret cast its shadow over the 
black and white marble squares of the court 
below, slate-colored doves with coral feet 
waltzed and cooed. Scheherazade! 

“What a curious old world it is!” she went 
on. “How bravely we go forth with what we 
think to be our own idea, when it is something 


CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 115 

long ago mapped out for us! I wonder if 
you will recall it—a noisy crowd of students 
on Broadway at night, subdued in a singular 
fashion? From an imaginative character, 
you became substance that night, Captain 
Wardlaw. The man I was with held me back 
at the edge of things. I liked that man. I 
was only eighteen. He was handsome, brave, 
resourceful. I even thought I loved him. 
But when he refused to go to the aid of my 
coachman—not from cowardice but from self¬ 
ishness—the dream dissolved. We saw a man 
force his way to the curb. We heard him 
speak quietly and sensibly. His absolute 
ease and common-sense averted a serious riot. 

“My escort uttered a name. It was yours. 
I broke away and ran after you. It seemed 
to me as if all New York was on Broadway 
that night, without objective. I could not 
reach you in time to thank you. You sud¬ 
denly dropped out of the crowd and entered 
a candy-shop. I watched you for a moment. 
You sat down before the soda-water counter 
and ordered a chocolate soda. That is why I 
laughed the other morning. A few minutes 
later I told my escort I would not marry him. 
Thanks, Captain! But for you I probably 
would have been Craig Carrington’s wife this 
day—a very unhappy woman. No doubt 
you have often, in a puzzled way, felt the 
weight of his enmity; for I am sure he always 
blamed you for my decision. You had played 
the man where he might have played it. Poor 
Uncle Henry! His play isn’t going to end 
the way he wrote it. I am still a rebel. I 


n6 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


would not marry you, Captain Wardlaw, if 
you were the last man in the world!” She 
turned and faced him. 

“Where are your wraps?” he demanded. 

“My wraps?”—thunderstruck. 

“Where are they?” 

“In the other room. What has happened?” 

Wardlaw dashed into the adjoining room 
and returned with the same furious haste. 

“Here!” He held up the cloak. 

She slipped her arms into the sleeves, hyp¬ 
notized by the suddenness of his words and 
actions. 

“Put your hat on! Hurry! We haven’t a 
moment!” 

She obeyed mechanically, star-eyed. He 
put on his own hat and coat. He caught her 
rather roughly by the arm and drew her to a 
window. 

“See that battleship’s searchlight?” 

“Yes!” 

“Kowloon. We’ll take a sampan.” 

“A sampan?” 

“And no time to lose, either! Ah Fee is 
near the Hong Kong Hotel. That won’t take 
a minute. On the way to the Praya. Come!” 

He drew her to the door and out into the 
hall. She was so bewildered and mystified 
that she offered no resistance, verbal or phys¬ 
ical. They reached the cable-house shortly, 
and Wardlaw summoned the man in charge. 

“Town. A sovereign when you get to the 
lower end. Stop for nobody. Get in,. Miss 
Cameron.” 

“Captain Wardlaw!” 



CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 117 

“It’s life and death, Scheherazade!” Ward- 
law literally propelled her into the car, keep¬ 
ing hold of her arm when he sat down beside 
her. “Start her, man, start her!” 

The car gave a little jerk and began to 
glide down toward the many flickering lights 
of Hong Kong. Still with her arm im¬ 
prisoned, Wardlaw helped her to alight from 
the car at the lower station. Then he raced 
down the street with her, hailing the first 
empty carriage. 

“Ah Fee’s, near the Hong Kong Hotel. 
Fast!” 

The Manchurian pony scuttled away for 
dear life. 

“I shall be here but a moment,” said Ward- 
law, as the carriage, with a lurch and a 
screech, drew up before the goldsmith’s shop. 
He dashed into the shop at top speed; two 
minutes later he dashed out and jumped into 
the carriage. “Praya—sampan!” 

Away they went. When they reached the 
water-front, Wardlaw dismissed the carriage, 
grasped the dazed young woman by the arm 
again and bored her through the moving 
streams of sailormen and Chinese. Presently 
she heard strange sounds, a bubbling and a 
gurgling. It was Wardlaw and the sampan- 
man arguing in Chinese. 

“All aboard!” cried Wardlaw. He led 
the girl to the middle seat, and they sat 
down. The Chinaman bore down upon the 
sweep. 

“Captain Wardlaw, will you be so kind as 
to tell me what all this is about?” There was 


n8 CAPTAIN WARDLAW’S KITBAGS 


a space—a breathing space—between each 
word, for she was all but breathless. 

He knew that in his next move he would 
risk everything; but he did not hesitate. He 
put his arm around her and kissed her, kissed 
her eyes, her lips, her hair. What did he care 
for the Chinaman at the sweep? He released 
her. 

“We are going to Kowloon. There lives a 
friend of mine. Back home we’d call him a 
sky-pilot. Around here they call him a 
splicer. I have four rings in my pocket.; 
One of them is bound to fit. We are going to 
be married, Scheherazade. We are not going 
to break Uncle Henry’s heart, but we’re going 
to let him eat his bally dinner alone!” 

After that, silence, except for the seethe of 
the water over the sweep and the lap-lap 
against the sides of the sampan. 

Romance! She had resented the cut-and^ 
dried affair so cleverly conceived by Ainslee. 
She wanted her own love-story; she refused 
one ready-made. When she told him shej 
would not marry him, the revelation came in 
a flash that if he left her then, it would be for¬ 
ever. And upon the heels of this revelation 
came the idea. The cave-man! It had the 
same ironical effect on his mind as a dash of 
cold water in the face of a man in a blistering 
desert. In that moment he understood; it was 
as if some rare occultism had given him the 
ability to see into her soul. 

Silence! It grew oppressive. Had he 
won her or lost her? As the lights of the 
Praya receded, his heart began to drop. Then, 


CAPTAIN WARD LAW’S KITBAGS 119 

when he had about given up hope, something 
touched his sleeve, hesitantly. This some¬ 
thing moved downward slowly, and presently 
it became a hand, warm and firm, and touch¬ 
ing his, rested there. And then, a ripple of 
happy laughter! 

“Heavens, I thought something dreadful 
had happened to Uncle Henry or that 
O. C. C.! Oh, man, what made you think of 
it? For if you hadn’t, I’d never have forgiven 
you. I’d have married you in the end, for 
I’ve loved you I don’t know how long. But 
always this would have been lacking. Let me 
have the rings.” 

The rings were all a little too large, but that 
did not matter. 


THE END 





HAROLD MacGRATH 


TLJAROLD MacGRATH was born in 
A Syracuse, September 4, 1871. He did 
not attain any great heights of fame as a school 
boy, but after being graduated from high 
school, he aspired to be a literary man. Ac¬ 
cordingly, he started the publication of a 
local weekly, christened the Breeze, which he 
financed with $500 of his father’s money. 
This was short-lived, however. He then 
tried his hand at poetry, but all his efforts 
were promptly returned from the publishers. 

As his writings did not seem to increase his 
fame, Mr. MacGrath turned his attention to 
journalism. Obtaining a position on the 
Syracuse Post Standard, he went to work for 
six months, at nothing a week. Then, led by 
a desire for larger fields and a salary, he re¬ 
signed and journeyed to Chicago, where he 
succeeded in securing a job with the Chicago 
Evening Mail. He left the Mail before it 
ceased publication and began free lancing in 
New York. This failed to bring an income, so 
he decided to visit relatives in Albany. With 
only a dollar to his name after a pool game on 
Broadway, he bought a steerage ticket and 
left on the night boat for Albany. 

When he arrived there, he got a position on 
the Albany Times Union at a salary, but not 
a very lucrative one, and after a time he went 
back to Syracuse where he was on the staff of 
various newspapers. 

Mr. MacGrath broke into magazines with 
an interview with William Dean Howells and 


HAROLD MacGRATH 


then suddenly, in 1899, he wrote a novel, 
“Arms and the Woman.” It was accepted by 
Ray Stannard Baker, at that time editor of 
McClure’s Syndicate, and appeared serially 
in the New York Sun and other papers. 
Since then, MacGrath has written such suc¬ 
cessful books as “The Man on the Box,” “The 
Lure of the Mask,” “The Goose Girl,” “The 
Carpet from Bagdad,” “The Drums of Jeo¬ 
pardy,” “The Pagan Madonna,” “The Ragged 
Edge.” 

Mr. MacGrath has been an inveterate globe 
trotter, but for the last few years has lived 
quietly in Syracuse, with his wife, his brother, 
and his dogs, writing novels and working in 
his garden. 













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r J ^HE following books can be purchased at any 
good store or newsstand. If your dealer has 
not the ones you want , ask him to get them for 
you. 


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Don Quickshot of the Rio Grande . . Stephen Chalmers 

Loaded Dice .Edwin L. Sabin 

Sontag of Sundown .W. C. Tuttle 

Spawn of the Desert .W. C. Tuttle 

Arizona Argonauts .H. Bedford-Jones 

The Lure of Piper’s Glen . . Theodore Goodridge Roberts 

Apache Valley .Arthur Chapman 

The Challenge of the North . . . James B. Hendryx 

The Second Mate .H. Bedford-Jones 

The Devil’s Payday .W. C. Tuttle 

The Canyon of the Green Death . . . F. R. Buckley 

Sky High Corral .Ralph Cummins 

The Seven Pearls of Shandi .... Magruder Maury 

The Last Grubstake .Anthony M. Rud 

The Sheriff of Pecos .H. Bedford-Jones 

The Wonder Strands .... Samuel Alexander White 

The Night Rider .Elmer B. Mason 

The Phantom Wolf .T. Von Ziekursch 

The Hen Herder .J. Allan Dunn 

The One Big Thing .James B. Hendryx 

Scavengers of the Sea .... George Ethelbert Walsh 

Musket House .Theodore Goodridge Roberts 

Mormon Valley .H. Bedford-Jones 

The Law of the Range .W. C. Tuttle 

The Beautiful Lady .Booth Tarkington 

Ma Pettingill Talks .Harry Leon Wilson 

North of Fifty-Three .Rex Beach 

Wings .Gene Stratton-Porter 

Touchstone .Edith Wharton 

Uneducating Mary .Kathleen Norris 

The Spanish Jade .Maurice Hewlett 

The Duel .Joseph Conrad 

The Gorgeous Isle .Gertrude Atherton 

The Dark Fleece .Joseph Hergesheimer 

An Amateur .W. B. Maxwell 

Captain Wardlaw’s Kitbags .... Harold MacGrath 


GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., Inc. 

Garden City, N. Y. 




























































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